Local orchards dealt another tough season

[/media-credit] A warm early spring cou­pled with a late frost means apple trees are bare this fall in most east­ern Indi­ana and west­ern Ohio orchards.

By Heather Nor­ton
hjnorton@embarqmail.com

CAMBRIDGE CITY, Ind. — The apples are still piled high in their rus­tic wooden crates, entic­ing cus­tomers to bag some up to take home. But the buy­ers and the sell­ers are both aware this fall that instead of com­ing off trees a few yards away, those apples trav­eled hun­dreds of miles.
“On the whole everybody’s been very nice, under­stand­ing,” said Shan­nan Hicks, who co-owns Dougherty Orchards with her fam­ily out­side of Cam­bridge City, Ind. “It’s been a hard year.”
The Dougherty own­ers lost all of their apple crop this spring when much warmer-than-normal tem­per­a­tures accel­er­ated the bud­ding and bloom­ing on the fruit trees, and then those blooms were killed by spring freezes. That’s a risk every spring, but the warmest March on record, accord­ing to the National Cli­matic Data Cen­ter, led to ear­lier bloom­ing and there­fore, greater dam­age.
The U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture apple crop fore­cast in August showed that the entire Mid­west apple crop was hard hit, while Wash­ing­ton state’s large crop was expected to increase this sea­son. The east­ern U.S. crop was down, but not as severely as the Midwest’s, where the USDA fore­cast was down 79 per­cent.
“We’re buy­ing from West Vir­ginia for our apples this year,” Hicks said. “Down south they did not lose their apples.”
Wesler Orchards & Farm Mar­ket in New Paris, Ohio, also lost their entire fruit tree crop this sea­son. Ron Wesler said they bought apples to sell to keep their busi­ness in oper­a­tion. Weslers has 40 acres of apple trees, as well as blue­ber­ries, peaches, straw­ber­ries, plums, cher­ries, black rasp­ber­ries, and black­ber­ries.
“Most apple vari­eties are avail­able just the vol­ume is down and the price is quite high due to the demand,” Wesler said. “Our other cane crops sur­vived the Spring freeze ok. Our grape crop was approx­i­mately 40 per­cent.”
The loss this year is espe­cially hard on east­ern Indi­ana and west­ern Ohio orchards because it comes after sev­eral rough sea­sons. Hicks said they lost 80 per­cent of the crop on their 100 acres of apples last year to hail dam­age, and in 2010 lost 50 per­cent to a freeze.
“Two orchards south of us and one east of us have just closed down for the sea­son,” she noted. “We just hope we can hold on for another year.”
Another sig­nif­i­cant fruit crop loss from freeze occurred in 2007 across the Mid­west, and accord­ing to the NCDC, resulted in bil­lions in dam­age or costs. The U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture reports Indi­ana has approx­i­mately 4,000 acres of apples and ranks 15th in pro­duc­tion in the United States. Ohio ranks 9th in the nation in apple pro­duc­tion.
Hicks said they do not sell their apples whole­sale, but gen­er­ate rev­enue from retail sales of apples, some pears and plums, and value-added prod­ucts and attrac­tions at their farm. Pur­chas­ing apples to have in their store essen­tially elim­i­nates most profit from that source, so the other income streams become top pri­or­ity.
“There are lots of rea­sons why peo­ple come out here,” Hicks said. “We’re always try­ing to increase our pet­ting zoo, which really brings peo­ple out. We also sell apple dumplings, dough­nuts, apple but­ter, pump­kins and other fall prod­ucts. We have a fam­ily mem­ber that makes honey that we sell, and we also make our own cider. We’re still try­ing to pro­vide the ser­vice we always have.”
Cus­tomers still come out, as well as school­child­ren on field trips, for the apples and “fall expe­ri­ence.” While many are sym­pa­thetic to and aware of the local apple loss, oth­ers just see higher prices and balk. Tyler Dougherty of Dougherty Orchards said the mix of a slow econ­omy with a lot of peo­ple still strug­gling and the higher apple prices can lead to dis­ap­point­ment and fewer sales.
Also, cus­tomers make the trek each year antic­i­pat­ing the unique apple vari­eties that the founded-in-1883 orchard grows.
“Most of our sup­pli­ers this year don’t grow those, so you have peo­ple com­ing in ask­ing, ‘Where’s this one or that one?’ and we have to tell them we don’t even have those in the store this year,” Dougherty said.

Posted by Ashley Fritz on Oct 10 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.