Nick, The size of a storage will depend on a lot of factors.
1). How long is your harvest period? The apples that we picked in August are sold long before we pick the last of the apples in October. 2). How long do your varieties keep. If you grow something highly in demand you might ask a higher price and have to store them until people want them. That may be November some years and it may be March other years. 3) How close is your alternative when your storage is full? I work with another orchard 15 miles away to store some excess fruit when I have a bumper crop. 4)How much do you expect to sell in a month? Conventional wisdom is that you have six to eight weeks to sell the apples once you break open a CA storage room. 5) Do you plan on using Smartfresh? You can have a small room where you smartfresh a few days harvest before moving it to the main storage room, or depending on the variety you can size a room for a week's harvest and smartfresh it all together. 6). Are you planning on growing any varieties with special chilling requirements. Honeycrisp require several days at 50 degrees before putting them in a colder room. I am afraid I didn't give you answers so much as more questions to ask yourself. Our storage capacity is 75% of our maximum yield and it gets pretty tight this time of year, but is sufficient 7 out of 10 years. I would suggest that you have a plan to add more storage capacity if the need arises than go whole hog at first. Ernest Rollins Owner Rollins Orchards, Garland, Maine, USA A Family Farm since 1821 rollinsorcha...@gmail.com www.RollinsOrchards.com ------Original Message------ From: Nick Lucking Sender: apple-crop-boun...@virtualorchard.net To: Apple-Crop virtual orchard ReplyTo: Apple-Crop virtual orchard Subject: [apple-crop] Sizing cold storage Sent: Oct 26, 2014 11:20 PM Does anyone have any good guides on how large a cold storage facility should be on your orchard? For example if one was to grow 15,000 bu. how much should you have capacity for storing, 50%, 75%? I can't really find much info on this. Cheers, Nick Lucking Cannon Valley Orchard Cannon Falls, MN _______________________________________________ apple-crop mailing list apple-crop@virtualorchard.net http://virtualorchard.net/mailman/listinfo/apple-crop Ernest Rollins Rollins Orchards Garland, Maine _______________________________________________ apple-crop mailing list apple-crop@virtualorchard.net http://virtualorchard.net/mailman/listinfo/apple-crop
