Almond nutrient and rootstock experiments - almonds

The first experiment is geared around fertilizer management and that's very much about the way we do things in the here and now. So, the plantings are the same as industry standards, now. The trick, the idea of that experiment though is, how can we get those trees established sooner to be producing sooner. That's basically it. Establishment, first crop, and the first crop we mean the first crop that isn't just nuisance value, so it's significant. And that really does have a strong impact on the overall rate of return, or return on investment over time, over the 20 years or 25 years. So that's the first experiment and because nitrogen is such a big input, highly productive almond orchards use probably 300 kilograms of actual nitrogen, per hectare per year. That's a lot. So, being able to get the most from that fertilizer or to make any savings is really quite significant across the entire industry.

So this is a spectroradiometer. It's a machine that take a spectral fingerprint between three hundred and two and a half thousand nanometres, so it's little increments. What it basically does is it measures the reflectance or the absorbance of light. So between 400 and 700 is what we can see with the naked eye, that's the visible range, red, green and blue. And then above that is the near infra-red range which we are interested in, because there's a lot of research being done previously, that shows that at certain way things you can determine the composition of water or nitrogen or chlorophyll or other compounds.

So this is a hyper-spectral imaging system. So it takes multiple wavelengths, thousands of wavelengths across the whole range. Currently a lot of the producers use multi-spectral imaging tools which is much smaller. It's easier to come by. You have indices already worked out. And they look at specific bands of wavelength, which you can determine. They've got crop indices or relative indices. You know how green your crop is if its stressing. A lot of people can, they already did the groundwork for that to put it back to the water content or nutrition of the trees. So if we can see that it's the same, we just keep on using the same tool. But we would like to fine tune it even more, specifically aimed at almonds. And if we can do it for almonds then we can start crossing over to other horticultural crops, and do the same. So what we were trying to do is to see if we can determine in almond leaves, the composition of the leaf for nutrients and for water, to ultimately take it up in the air using a UAV, and take a spectral reading  of your trees. So, we will then do a few sums and do a little bit of magic on the computer. And then you can advise the producers on reducing your nitrogen nutrition, increasing nitrogen nutrition or how to manage your irrigation. If you have enough water in the tree or, not. So the nice thing about flying with UAV is you can do a large area in a very very small amount of time and it's non-destructive. Whereas the old way of doing nutrient content of the leaves etc., you have to physically go out, walk your orchard, collect leaves and you need massive samples to be representative of your whole orchard and obviously all the trees are heterogeneous. So it's not the same. So in order to get a proper sample it takes time. You have to send the leaves away for analysis. You only get it back in two weeks, and then you can make a decision about your condition or your water. So UAV's, real time, instant answer, and then you can make a decision without, on a big area at a time or on a different orchard depending on what you want to look at or even individual trees. To ground prove the spectroradiometer  data, you need a lot of analysis, and you need a lot of spectral fingerprints to be able to make a definitive answer that this fingerprint and this specific awakening indicates this amount of nitrogen. So in order to take it back to the almond  orchard we will have to do some trials in the almond orchard as well because of differences in leaf structure. And any crop differs in leaf structure, so your fingerprint will change a little bit. So it might be that your weighting that you are looking at will shift a little bit for different crops. So we will do a generic fingerprint for tomatoes, and we have a lot of literature from before, which we know where we will have to look at for which compounds, or for water which people have done before, so we can skip a little bit of information without starting from scratch, not reinventing the wheel. And then we'll take it back to the almond orchard and see if it correlates and if we can determine the right wavelengths. It might be that it's exactly the same, but we think that it will show a shift. It will shift a little bit according to variety and according to crop.  It will definitely. The tomato plant is for us to have plant material available. A lot of plant material in a very short period of time, because obviously we cannot grow almond trees as fast as we would like to, to maturity. So we are doing some treatments on them to try and change the composition of the leaves which is very easy. So in about two months you have plans that you can work with. Obviously the producer can't afford.some of this equipment because it's quite expensive. Hyperspectral cameras, it's very technical equipment. And also the management of the data is quite, it's quite difficult and it's quite tricky. So what we would like to do is, if we know exactly which way wavelength to look at in almonds, specifically or in a different crop we will extend it later on. So, if you know for wavelength 680 you can determine your nitrogen nutrition, then we would make a hand tool for the producer to take out into the field, and he can scan the tree by himself and he will have a real time, direct answer of his nitrogen contained or water, depending on what we're looking at. And then they can make a management decision according to that and reduce or increase their nutrition or irrigation. There will be a generic protocol,obviously because soils differ, climate differ, the size of the trees differ. So certain areas will have different yields, so you will have to basically do your thresholds for your, you have to change it according to your circumstances and your orchard over time. . It's a plant. It does it's a biological system. They all differ. So we will have a tool that will give you an indication of what is actually going on in your orchard. But if you want to do more fine tuning you will have to go a little bit deeper into your own circumstances and your own environment in the long run.