Field notes4 min read
Planting by hand in a mechanised age
Some crops still ask for human hands. Why we plant our glasshouse herbs and young orchard trees one at a time.
By The Krishi team
Machines plant most of what we grow, and they do it well. But some jobs still go faster and better by hand, and planting young fruit trees is one of them.
Reading the ground
A good planter feels the soil as they work: a stone here, a wet patch there, a root from an old hedge. They adjust the depth and the angle of every tree. No machine does that yet.
“You plant a tree for the person who will pick from it in twenty years.”
It is slower, and it costs more. It is also why our orchards lose fewer than two percent of young trees in their first year.
