They're thinking about thinning

Mid-Valley peach farmers could soon get a helping hand — or rather a mechanical boost.

That was the advice for Yuba-Sutter farm owners Wednesday at an annual peach-growing summit, where Janine Hasey, a University of California adviser, discussed the promise — and limits — of mechanical tree thinning bringing down costs in an increasingly costly field.

At the Sacramento Valley Cling Peach Day in Yuba City, Hasey, offered a glimpse of the cost and time savings a peach-thinning machine offered during tests in Sutter County last spring.

The UC extension plans another demonstration of thinning equipment this year, which Hasey hoped could help at least a few farmers to stay profitable raising peaches.

"That's why so many growers have gone over to walnuts and almonds, because they're more mechanized crops," she said. "With walnuts you only need three people to harvest — one to run the shaker, one for the sweeper and then a pickup machine operator."

Peach growers usually thin their trees between late April and May, hiring workers to pull some of the immature fruit off the branches so the remaining ones grow larger. But the supply of laborers is volatile and often expensive — more so in years with bumper crops, when the extra manpower needed to tend the orchards negates much of the extra revenue.

The machine, a tractor-like contraption, thinned an acre of peach trees at a cost of $95, compared to about $800 for a hand-thinned acre and $280 for a combination of the two, Hasey reported. Speed picked up as well, with a mix of machine and hand thinning requiring only 16 minutes per laborer against 50 minutes using the older method.

Filling the labor gap with machinery offers one of the few ways to cut costs in the future, according to some of the growers who attended the Cling Peach Day.

"The less hand labor you have, the less the costs are because hand labor is so expensive," said Ignacio Ayala, a farm foreman for Siller Bros. Inc. who oversees about 35 acres of peach orchards south of Yuba City. "That's been a challenge for decades but recently, with the higher costs of pesticide and fertilizer, there's been no place to cut back without hurting the crop."

"Anything to get the labor costs down and deal with the lack of labor helps the return to the orchard," said another grower, John Callis of Naumes Inc. near Linda. "It's probably one of the most critical aspects (in growing) today."

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Howard Yune at 749-4708 or hyune@appealdemocrat.com.