Presentation by Greg Lang, Michigan State University, Cherry Institute 2021. The introduction of vigor-controlling rootstocks for sweet cherries in the late 1990s led to a decade of physiological research to understand how to successfully grow big cherries on small trees, concomitant with explorations of new ways to train sweet cherry canopies to improve within-canopy light distribution, fruit quality, and potential partial mechanization of orchard tasks. In 2010, the NC-140 rootstock research project scientists initiated cooperative trials across North America to examine four distinct sweet cherry canopy architectures on a range of precocious, vigor-controlling Gisela rootstocks. This presentation will summarize the 10-year results of that trial, which increasingly appear to be conducive to facilitation of the recent rapid advances in orchard sensing and robotic technologies as well as simply greater precision in production and efficiencies when human labor is still required.
