The peach orchard that used to occupy this ground was in its waning years. Dead primaries hung reluctantly from a stump, tangled in tie twine as the remaining few live branches tried to put forth decent fruit in a sandy strip that runs diagonally through the property. They were Sommerset peaches, just under 2 acres of them. We would place a few San Jose Scale trials in this area, occasionally an herbicide trial or a powdery mildew experiment. Eventually we decided that the orchard had seen its last season, so we fired up a Stihl ms261 and started the removal process. A few weeks of cutting, sharpening, stacking, and we had a pile of curing wood that would heat the house of a local missionary family for years. The peaches were gone. Stumps were pulled from the ground by chain and drawbar, and all that remained was a barren stand of soil, fallowed, and ready for the next project. We knew that something would eventually come up that justified the acreage, but in the meantime we grew tomatoes in the summer and disked a hearty block of Lambsquarter and Pigweed in the fall. These weeds put deep roots down and challenged the mettle of our harrows until we were ready to put the ground to work, doing what it does best.
Recently, one of our clients inquired as to whether we would conduct a nematicide trial to test the efficacy of one of their products. We penciled out the cost, and determined that the project was a perfect fit. The sandy soil would accommodate a healthy nematode population, irrigation was accessible, and the season was primed and ready for the experiment to begin.
Our goal was to establish a small orchard-vineyard combination to test the product on several crops. We sourced walnut and almond trees, and young grape vines with highly susceptible rootstocks to ensure proper infestation. Careful rootstock selection allows us a higher likelihood that nematodes will proliferate in the test system, and that the efficacy data will be meaningful.
The trial design is simple. It’s a randomized, replicated layout with an untreated check. The idea is to plant the trees and vines, inoculate the soil surrounding the root ball, and apply the experimental product at prescribed crop stages. At the end of each of the next three years, we’ll dig up 2 trees from each treatment, in each replication. We’ll determine the extent to which the nematicide controlled the target pest by analyzing the damage present in the sample trees. After this, we’ll process the data and report back to the client with what we hope is a strong result, suggestive of high efficacy.
One of the benefits that we have at FieldLab is our ability to conduct trials that fall outside of the common protocol objectives that we most often see. We typically apply experimental products to an established crop to assess efficacy on an observed population of a given pest. In this case, with unconventional plant spacing, pest inoculation, and a multi-year commitment; things were different. This study presented us the opportunity to put some of our unused ground to work, and allowed us to apply some creativity to the way that we executed it. This type of project comes with the sort of challenges that we are excited and motivated to overcome. We’re grateful for the work, and we’re glad to say that it falls within our grasp.
