What Organic Apples Look & Sound Like. It is a naturally noisy time of year. Various crickets, katydids and grasshoppers are out there wooing their consorts with a cacophony of trills and clicks. Many organic orchards contribute to the chorus, and are also noisy places. The conventional orchard blocks I have visited tend to be quieter. The two blue-screen images included here are sonograms, the first from a conventional orchard block and the second from an organic block. The sonograms show time along the bottom and frequency along the side. The intensity of the sound at a given time and frequency is shown by how light the patterning is, with lighter meaning louder. The lack of light patterning in the sonogram from the conventional orchard block suggests that there is little in the way of insect calling, although a couple of faint trills are visible. The organic orchard sonogram shows much more patterning and a more complex sound community; at least three species were calling loudly. If you would like to hear the recordings portrayed by the sonograms, the conventional orchard can be heard at this link, hvfarmscape.org/nuggets/uploads/blogwaves/conv%20wave.wav, and the organic orchard at this link, hvfarmscape.org/nuggets/uploads/blogwaves/org%20wave.wav. However, while the liveliness of many organic orchards certainly makes them more interesting acoustically than some conventional orchards, insect life can negatively impact apple production. The last two pictures compare a conventional and organic apple; the first is nearly perfect, the second more impaired by pest damage (although the callers themselves are not usually the damaging pests). Both are good apples (I can, having just ate it, attest to the general culinary soundness of the organic apple), the question, in part, is what do we as consumers accept and hence facilitate orchardists to produce? Do we want the noisy apple or the unblemished one? Can we move the sweet spot of financially viable orchard production in a way that results in more orchard life? These are not simple questions for consumers or producers, yet there is clearly more to an apple than its looks. As largely visual organisms, it may behoove us to sometimes listen to our fields, to our lawns, to our gardens and to our orchards - they might be telling us something.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 17:59:22 +0000
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