While I am still nailing down orchard land access, I have assembled this vision:
‘Over-the-Hill’ Orchard Vision:
A fiscally-, socially- and environmentally-sustainable orchard featuring a mix of tree and perennial crops and support plants with complementary harvest labor requirements, so that harvest workers work steadily through a long picking season, and so that revenue flows in steadily throughout much of the year.
Crop and support plants to be chosen to also have complementary life cycles, yielding steady financial returns through the decades, in that as one crop yields, then expires, another begins yielding.
Also, plans are to include crop redundency so that one crop’s failure or one market‘s collapse will not bankrupt the orchard.
These crops and support plants are to be chosen to grow and yield well, and be harvested workably, on slopes too steep for conventional agriculture, thereby complementing and not competing with such uses of flatter land.
Such plants are to be planted in rows on contour-line-aligned berms with ditches/swales uphill. These berm-and-swale assemblages are spaced widely enough apart to facilitate mechanized haying, or pasturing between.
Plants are to be chosen as possible future breeding material, as this is a pioneering effort, hence select offspring might found a next generation of steep land horticultural farms’ plants, and offer an additional financial yield to ‘Over-the-Hill’ orchard in the sales of selected seedling or grafted plants.
‘Pick-Your-Own’ harvesting will be thoughtfully considered as a harvesting approach.
Documenting the entire project throughly would allow others to economically forecast from this data and experience.
I invite your thoughts on this,
Brian
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