This was the proceedings from the 9th International meeting in Geneva in 2008 of the joint International Society for Horticultural Sciences working group meeting of Orchard Systems, Rootstocks and Environmental Physiology of Fruits.
This course's content includes site selection and management, rootstock and cultivar selection, orchard systems, pest and nutrient management, and harvest considerations.
Topics included economic analyses of soil health costs and benefits; the relationship between soil health and climate change; addressing challenges of reducing tillage on vegetable farms; soil health for apple orchard systems; fortifying biochar with manure wastes as marketable fertilizer; and research on cover crop interseeding and perennial grains.
Measures aimed at managing microbial communities in orchard soil to promote plant heath and minimize pathogen aggressiveness can be effective in many situations, though the satisfactory efficacy of such an approach across the diversity of orchard systems needs further investigation.
On dwarfing rootstock orchard planting systems with considerably smaller trunk diameter and shallow rooting systems, trees are at greater risk to the impact of disease and insect pests and environmental stresses.
Furthermore, the study assesses the environmental benefits coming from the application of the examined orchard management systems focusing especially on CO2 stocks in plants and soil, and anthropogenic and natural CO2 emissions.
Orchard design, training system and pruning can dramatically impact the skin overcolor and the maturity of the fruit.
An orchard precision management system plays an important role in improvement at the management level and the enhancement of decision abilities.
The results also strongly suggest that implementing participatory activities and providing more information about the orchard, the food system, and the environment on the site could increase the impacts on the four social phenomena studied.
Highly informative SSR markers generate multiple alleles, thus favoring germplasm/clonal identification, genetic integrity determination during propagation and controlled breeding, seed orchard diversity, mating system and outcrossing rate analysis (Falahati-Anbaran et al. [2007]).
