Faced with climate change and severe weather this year, farmers and especially arborists are on the front line. After frost episodes in May, drought this summer and hail in Junethe bad weather this Wednesday, August 17 which affected the south of the Loire is once again a blow for arborists located in the region of Valfleury, Saint-Romain-en-Jarez, Cellieu or Chagnon, while the harvest is starting right now for plums, apples and pears.
– Mathilde Errard
So of course there are anti-hail protections: some arborists have installed nets above their trees which allow hailstones to be retained to protect the fruits from the impacts of hail. The region has seen these sorts of white canvases flourish on the orchards from the beginning of the 2000s.
But not all arborists are 100% protected yet. This is the case of Bruno Colomban, in Chagnon. Out of 15 hectares of orchards, two are protected with nets. So 80% of its crops are lost this year due to Wednesday’s hailand in particular its pears. “From a distance, it looks like there is nothing. But when you get closer, the pears are all open, you can even see the flesh. And as soon as it’s pierced like that, it will rot It’s unsaleable!”
– Mathilde Errard
But today, it is very complicated for him to install nets. This kind of protection arises when the trees are planted, but Bruno’s pear trees are 30 years old for some. And at that time, this investment did not seem essential to him: “20 or 25 years ago, we took less hail and perhaps less violently than today. In general, hail always falls in July or August. And now, we have to protect practically everything. We can clearly see that the climate is changing.”
And there is also the cost that slows down this investment : between 15,000 and 20,000 euros per hectare. In the neighboring village of Valfleury, Sylvain Bonjour decided to install these protections as soon as he settled on the family farm in 1998: “We didn’t know what hail was in the early 1990s. And in fact, we took a big hit of hail in 1994 which made me change my mind a bit. Because all the “The energy we put in to produce all year, we can lose it in a few seconds. So the net is very important.”
A loss of 10,000 or 15,000 euros per hectare
Today, a large part of Sylvain’s apple orchards are under nets, and he was able to save 95% of his fruit from hail this year.
But some of these plum trees were not protected, so 50 to 70% of his orchard is damaged, “a loss of around 10,000 or 15,000 euros per hectare”. So this arborist will try to collect all the fruit as much as possible, even if this sorting will require a lot of work time for little profit.