Demand for organic apples at our tail gate markets allowed me to look at growing my own organic apples, something I was unfamiliar with.
When I reached out to the "experts" no one shared my enthusiasm for trying to do this. The excuses were disheartening and pushed me on a path to do everything myself which I was glad to do. Tired of hearing the negative rhetoric, I decided to use my new orchard as a testing ground against conventional orcharding methods.
I read a lot of stuff including Michael Phillips, who has called organic apple growing, the final frontier of organics. I came to the conclusion that I would try to grow heirloom varieties that originated here in New Jersey for marketing and diversity reasons. For root stock, I decided to go with a standard root stock, Antonovka, which grows a very deep root system similar to the dandelion. I did this because of the changing climatic conditions in my area which include a lot more windy days. Plus I wanted the roots to be deeply established. Of course, growing this root stock means no production for at least 5-7 years. So be it.
My oldest trees are now beginning their fourth year. It has been trial and tribulation. I have focused a lot on the health of the soil because I feel that is the key to producing a healthy tree. It has been interesting to watch how the tree fights off diseases such as Cedar Rust. I have not encountered fire blight - yet.
My goal is to prove that it can be organically and I'm confident I will.
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"Yet, fertilizers can push this waifish modern tree to grow about 50 full-size apples, compared to as many as 300 or so on the old-style trees. But instead of some 300 trees to an acre spaced about 10 feet apart, trees are planted 18 to 24 inches apart and there are 1,500 or so trees to an acre."
So, 50x1500=75,000 (new) vs 300x300=90,000 (old). So higher yields with older methods. So, there is something else going on to cause the move to industrial farming of apples.
"Another contributing factor may be that the new apple trees are not as resistant to disease. “They are the equivalent of a caged chicken, planting them in crowded conditions and pushing them with nutrients to grow 50 or more apples to a tree,” Dr. Cox said."
Maybe the orchardists need to take a page from the chicken breeders? The breeders are fanatic about QC, because disease can quickly kill a whole house of chickens. Workers in houses are from different towns, for example.
Never the less, a very good article.
I have around two dozen apple trees, almost all of them heirloom varieties. I haven’t seen any fire blight on them, knock wood. But they are planted 10 feet apart and we rarely have moist weather combined with high temperatures. They are healthy things. I never spray them.
There is nothing like a ripe eating apple eaten straight off the tree, a little warm from the sun. So juicy that it dribbles down your chin. One of my better producers this year was Freedom. Not an heirloom, since it was bred about 60-70 years ago. But it’s disease resistant, including to fire blight. A good all-around apple, and a very pretty fruit as well. Easy grower.
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Climate change is a Chinese hoax. That’s what Americans believe.
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Strange math here: For the new trees, 50 apples per tree times 1500 trees per acre gives 75,000 apples per acre which, at 125 apples per bushel, is 600 bushels per acre, far from 2000. For the old trees, 300 apples per tree times 300 trees per acre gives 90,000 apples per acre, which is 720 bushels per acre, far from 200-300. The old trees give more apples than the new ones, completely contrary to rest of the article.
I sent in a correction email as well. I wonder what the truth is.
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@Russell Lyons, math is hard ;-)
Here is a theory. Perhaps the trellised apples produce more marketable fruit? When you grow apples you need to remove fruit (apples grow in tight clusters) when it’s small in order to allow room for fewer, larger (premium quality), pest free apples to develop. It’s labor intensive work. If the trees are grown at human height, the fruit can be thinned more efficiently and thoroughly than in the large trees. The bigger trees would probably produce more unmarketable fruit because they would be less thoroughly thinned. The too small and deformed fruit can go to other uses, but it’s not generally sold to distributors. So it is possible — maybe — that the reporter got caught up in marketable versus unmarketable quantities of apples. Just a guess.
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@Passion for Peaches Apples are one of the best "fillers" for jam. And of course "unmarketable" apples can be cut up for commercial pies, or pressed for juice (which can be fermented for hard cider).
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@Passion for Peaches Interesting guess, but the article describes the apples in both cases as "full-size apples".
So enchanting ,outstanding...and with passion described by John Irving’s “Rules of the cider house “!
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Global warming denier Republican farmers are one of the nation's largest crops of Republicans. Those good citizens know that the free enterprise system will manage crop disease best.
Stand back and let the farmers manage their businesses. Let the Times report how effectively the farmers deal with the fire blight.
The rest of us can offer our thoughts and prayers for the families of the dead trees.
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So in the end genetically modified foods have found their demise, due to us humans.
@Calleen Mayer These apples are not genetically modified. They have simply been selected into elite cultivars, and varieties that do not fit a narrow range of ideal are simply neglected into near-extinction.
The problem lies in the fact that high-yielding, high-nutrition varieties often are not "high-resistance" varieties. They are "inbred lines" and this means small gaps in resistance in the early progenitors of these lines have been magnified over time.
This is similar to problems with "purebred" animal breeds that often have classic health issues such as heart defects in Maine Coon cats.
Two paths lie open for management of fire blight in apples. 1. We can search for a gene (or genes) that confer fire blight resistance and engineer it into popular apple varieties over a few years. 2. We can grow other "heirloom" varieties of apples that are more naturally resistant to fire blight. We can also try to cross these varieties with popular ones to try and get the resistance combined with the traits we like - but this takes time and money! It could take decades to identify and breed these traits using conventional (not genetic engineering) methods.
It is important to understand that heirloom does not automatically mean better. While an heirloom variety might be more resistant to fire blight it might be more susceptible to *other* diseases that our current varieties handle just fine.
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And once again we have evidence that the average person has no understanding of what constitutes genetic modification.
Commercially produced apple trees are always grafted, because apples cross pollinate indiscriminately and produce unpredictable offspring. Grafting means you take part of a tree that produces desirable fruit and attach it to the root stock of a variety that is disease resistant (and may or may not produce good fruit). The tissues and vascular systems grow together, and the two plants become one tree. The genes are not altered, for either the root stock or the scion. Genetically, the parts remain unique.
Hybridizers attempting to develop a new variety manually pollinate the flowers of one variety tree with the pollen from another variety. This produces seed — variable seed — with qualities of both trees. These seeds are grown on and assessed, and if any of the offspring are worthwhile they will be propagated through grafting. The genetics are not altered, but are randomly mixed.
One of the most notorious genetically modified foods is corn (maize). The genetic modification in corn that I know about (there are more now) is the insertion of a protein from bacillus thuringiensis (bt) into the corn embryo. That bacillus kills insects that ingest it, particularly caterpillars. So bt corn is deadly to harmful insects like corn ear worm, as well as innocuous ones (like Monarch butterflies). The genetics of the corn are altered. Engineered. In a laboratory.
@Calleen Mayer, I ran out of room in my previous comment, so here is my addendum. I know of only one genetically engineered apple variety. It’s the trademarked Arctic Apple, and it’s really fascinating how it was developed. The fruit does not go brown (oxidize) when sliced because some of the genes have been “turned off” (gene silencing).
But, as I said, that has nothing to do with the content of the article.
I had an badly infected pear tree in Flushing, but was able to treat it with copper sulfate. It recovered and gave me huge delicious yields year after year. Unfortunately, the ignorant builder that bought the place destroyed that tree as well as many fig trees before constructing a huge new house. The Chinese family who moved in has no idea what they missed. My Chinese friends love having their own free backyard fruit.
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We should expect more of these types of epidemics in the near future due to climate change. It is sure to wreak havoc with industrialized farming and monoculture crops. Warmer weather will breed more destructive insects, microbes, fungi, and diseases than we can imagine. The only remedy is to aggressively move away from fossil fuels in order to cool the planet and calm our weather.
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This breaks my heart. This is just scary, sad and should be alarming for everyone. I cannot imagine a world without apples. Or oranges or pears. I discovered Fuji apples at the Santa Monica Sunday Farmer's Market, around 1995. I now get at another SM farmer's market, closer to me. Sometimes I can get at Whole Foods 365. If it's not a Fuji, I can't eat them. I love them. Others might eat candy or junk food. I reach for a small Fuji. It's the simple pleasures, the healthy foods, which are disappearing. Yet so few care. Razing an apple orchard should alarm people. But ... her emails and all that jazz. But sadly, even Obama ignored issues of food safety and healthy food re Monsanto and FDA. It's bipartisan and lip service. Very sad. When are people going to get 'woke' about food issues? One can dream.
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Tower Hill is one of the agricultural gems of central Massachusetts, and a wonderful place to visit. I have only been a few times and did not have an opportunity to visit the apple trees; I hope my children will have the chance to enjoy them when they are regrown there.
While I am particularly fond of particular varietal apples, and glad we have plenty of fruit available, I will reluctantly step back if it means the trees can be preserved for future generations. I would not want to deny the joys of a farm-fresh Honeycrisp or Mutsu.
However, I can live without the modern Red Delicious. The only accurate part of their name is Red.
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Given the blight enters the tree's reproductive system, it would qualify as a sexually transmitted disease. Humans are not the only ones with this problem.
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Maybe, we will have to sacrifice super high yield and go back to growing fruit trees in the more traditional method so that blighted branches can be cut out.
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@Nina Suburban back yards are excellent locations for fruit trees. Decorative in the spring, providing shade in summer, and fruit in the fall. What's not to like?
Man (or woman, to be PC), these newfangled problems with even such lowly things such as the apple is alarming but nothing new; almost confirms that humankind is all going the way of the dinosaur!
Pricing externals at zero has accumulated an ecological debt, of which this is one example.
Mother Nature always collects her debts.
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Pears are especially vulnerable, given how susceptible their fast-growing wood is to blight. I manage a community orchard and we've been fighting blight in our pears for years, losing several and having to cut back several to stumps, hoping they'll recover. Our apples have had a little here and there, but manageable. A local bio-ag company with a focus on low-toxicity, ecologically-based products donated some of their product they've found to be effective against blight. Here's hoping that takes care of it!
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