2 - 



I plan to report in Fruit Notes on the fruit industry in the 

 Netherlands and its trends'^ and on research developments. The first 

 of several articles appears below in which the statistics of the 

 fruit industry are summarized with major emphasis on apples. 



^The reclaimed land surrounded by dikes is a polder. Each polder 

 has a name. A polder may be small in area or over 100,000 acres 

 in size, such as the North-east polder. 



AAAAAAAA*AAAA:f:A 



NETHERLANDS AND ITS FRUIT INDUSTRY 



William J. Lord 

 Department of Plant and Soil Sciences 



Over 13.5 million people live in the Netherlands, a country 

 about 1/3 larger than Massachusetts. Population density is nearly 

 1000 per square mile, but in the western part of the country it is 

 nearly 8 times as high. An area about the same size as Greater 

 London, which includes the cities of Dordrecht, Rotterdam, Delft, 

 the Hague, Leiden. Haarleem, Amsterdam, Hilversum, and Utrecht, 

 has a population of about 5 million. 



The Netherlands has an oceanic climate with no hot summers or 

 cold winters and little snow. It is situated 52" north latitude 

 and therefore the light intensity is low; hence the interest in 

 small fruit trees which utilize light more efficiently than large 

 trees. 



The land is flat, half of which has been taken from the sea. 

 The marine and river clay soils on which most orchards are found 

 have a high clay and silt content. They are frequently shallow but 

 the combination of rich soil, humid climate, and a high water table 

 produces vigorous tree growth unless controlled both by dwarfing 

 rootstocks and pruning. 



Major fruit crops . The acreage of major fruit crops is shown in 

 Table 1. It can be noted that the acreage has decreased since 1950. 

 However, the decrease in strawberry acreage has been less dramatic 

 because of a surge in planting during the 1950's. 



In 1969, there were 2688 tree fruit holdings of 12.5 acres or 

 more (Table 2). Orcharding is less specialized than in Massachusetts 

 and many of the orchardists produce sizeable tonnage of each major 

 tree fruit. This means that the acreage of either apple, pear, 

 plum of cherry on a fruit farm may be quite small by our standards. 



