Or resourceful chemists will continue to refine the methodology of creating pesticides that are increasingly species specific and less disruptive to the overall ecology. Were it not for chemistry, our species would be far less successful. Why would we not apply all of our genius to the singularly most important industry we engage in- that of agriculture?
Yes it is easier to produce many of the species of fruit human beings most enjoy in a Mediterranean climate, but there isn’t much land available in those zip codes and much of it is being used for homes and wine grapes.
Growing fruit for personal consumption is much different than growing commercial fruit where paying customers have high expectations. We promoted the idea of “low spray” apples which had some defects last year. Unfortunately, my customers refused to purchase the fruit. I gave the apples away as deer or horse apples which produced some goodwill, but goodwill does not pay the bills!
I’m happy you have not had a problem with SWD on your blueberries. Several small commercial growers in my area refused to spray for SWD and had a huge problem several years ago By the time they understood the problem, their fruit was full of SWD maggots. They shut down for the rest of the year and are still recovering. In both cases the SWD problem just about put these farms out of business. Their customers were grossed out by the fruit maggots for a good reason.
I could be a LOT more lenient about spraying my fruit if I was not selling it. Unfortunately, almost all paying customers demand perfect fruit like you see in Whole Foods or another high end retailer. Its a shame that people are so focused on the appearance of the fruit, but I learned a long time ago that you must give customers what they demand rather than what I would like to provide. We will all be better off when customers focus less on picture perfect fruit. I see some small movement in that direction, but its going to take a long, long time.
I did just that this summer on a small scale to experiment. I must say it was super easy and I had the most beautiful cabbages, no worms, no holes in the leaves and perfectly clean. I used the lightest frost cloth I could find, suspended it on hoops, buried the sides and ends with dirt and left it alone. Only once in the early summer did I gingerly lift one side to weed, after that I was too afraid of letting in the cabbage butterflies. Sure weeds grew under it, but they were not visible and the rain and water went right thru the cloth.
You are correct about most customers shunning a worm peach.
Let me say however: I once bought some peaches from a roadside stand in New England, next to someone’s farmhouse, in the middle of nowhere. This was late August.
Those peaches looked “organic.” Some were unblemished. Some were riddled with worms. The stand reaked of peaches, fresh and fermented. It was filthy, with flies buzzing everwhere.
I bought white and yellow peaches. I did not wash them. I ate them in the car as I drove, carefully eating around any rotten bits.
I’d say I definitely take the opposite approach. I try to farm as much like I would farm if I were growing just for my own family except in larger volumes. I try hard to lead my customers instead of following their demands. (I really have very little respect the agricultural literacy of the average consumer.) That limits what I can sell, but it builds trust and customer loyalty, especially as customers get to know our farm better, and that in turn opens up opportunities both to sell things we wouldn’t otherwise be able to sell and also to educate our customers on why what makes sense superficially to them as consumers doesn’t always make the most sense below the surface.
A big part of making my marketing model work seems to have been (besides not expecting to make much money, living in a way that we can live very well without much money, and being prepared and expecting markets for products to mostly start small and grow slowly) beginning with the easy products (products that are similar to what they’re already buying and without especially challenging costs) and especially the easy products that people will come back for week after week (particularly vegetables), which really helps to build relationships with customers (including getting them on a weekly e-mail list that gives us a means of communicating with them in a little more depth than normally happens in casual conversation), and also growing lots of different things so that I can make a lot of money from a smaller number of customers instead of making a little money from a large number of customers. I’d guess that 55-60% of our income comes from customers that are spending $500-$2500/year with us.
Once I had a blackberry U-pick customer who was really worried her fruit would have worms. I had to emphatically reassure her the blackberries were sprayed and so did not have worms, lol.
Here, my blackberries must be sprayed weekly to prevent SWD. I’ve had some problems with SWD and had to stop picking blackberries. The nice thing I like about blackberries though is even if they start to get worms, it’s not the end of the harvest for the rest of the season. By resuming regular spraying and not picking for a week, will allow the wormy fruit to drop and the newly ripening fruit will be clean.
Of course it’s best to pick up and destroy the wormy fruit, but it’s not always practical for me. That’s one thing which hasn’t been mentioned much on this thread. Destroying wormy fruit helps quite a bit (especially SWD). Most backyard orchardists probably don’t want rotted fruit laying around anyway, but thought I’d mention it.
Also, concerning SWD, I’ve read that diversity can increase the problem because the pest can simply move from one fruit to another as the season progresses. That’s what I see with my fruits. They want to move from cherries to peaches to blackberries and then back to peaches. We have a hole filled with water where we throw the peach drops to try to drown SWD, but sometimes we get pretty far behind picking up drops. That’s where I wish I could run some livestock (like pigs) to eat up the drops.
I think if I just had blackberries, and no other stone fruit, I might be able to grow blackberries without any sprays because their harvest window is only a month long. That might not be long enough for SWD populations to get established and build.
I’m definitely a “bad” organic customer. I’ll accept some russetting or some minor blemishes, but I’d rather have conventionally sprayed produce instead of diseased looking or wormy looking stuff, and no one is convincing me otherwise.
I admit though I have a heavy bias. When I was a kid, we had a lot of produce from a large vegetable garden, and I distinctly remember picking out worm after worm in the broccoli, for example…and then you always missed some, so you’d cook it and scoop a few dead worms off the top of the water. And then there was always one that was hidden and stuck somewhere that you didn’t see until it was two inches from your mouth.
I vowed then that I would never eat wormy fruit or vegetables if I could at all help it.
My own garden is sprayed with BT or spinosad about once a week, and I would go to more conventional pesticides without a problem if those stopped working.
On a slightly different topic, I’m quite envious of you all who can get organic apples for so cheap–1.29 a pound! I went to the grocery store yesterday and the only non-Delicious apples in that price range were some conventional Gala at 1.39/lb. The organics were $4-5 a pound. Then again, the Deep South isn’t exactly noted for their organic apple farms. I’m sure that has a lot to do with the price.
I wonder if ducks might be an easier way to serve that purpose. I know you’ve raised hogs before, though, which makes me curious: do you think it could really be practical to keep hogs in an orchard? I assume you’d ring their noses to keep them from rooting? It’s hard for me to imagine them not doing more damage than good. And with the way food safety guidelines are heading, I can’t imagine hogs in the orchard being at all in line with those guidelines (which even if they don’t carry the force of law yet are often required by farmers markets or insurance companies, etc., so that practically they almost have the force of law) so long as there were any peaches still to be picked. Do you see any potential at all for using hogs to clean up drops while keeping with such guidelines? (I definitely don’t mean to say the guidelines are all good and wise, but even if they’re completely misguided, they’re often an issue regardless.)
I think it’s worth differentiating between customers that genuinely have different values when it comes to how best to grow things and customers that make purchasing decisions that contradict what they’d do if they were to grow things for themselves. Even if customers don’t know much about growing things, I think it’s good for them to find farmers that they can trust and that share their values so that their purchasing decisions at least come close to aligning with their values.
Not really, for all the reasons you suggest. I just wish we could.
For me, I think one of the biggest “threats” to my small operation is a lot of others joining in. Small farming is “hot” right now. Lots of interest.
The problem is that many who want to start farming, jump right in without any idea what to expect (lots of physical labor and fairly low returns on labor). Then they expect to sell the produce dirt cheap, undercutting other farmers. When they go out of business, there are more new farmers to replace them.
One of the markets I go to is an organic market (I’m the only vendor there who is not organic.) There was a vendor there this summer who, along with her husband, quit their professional jobs to start farming, with no experience. They are mostly growing sprouts and vegetables. This year their potato crop failed, so they were pretty much just selling sprouts at the market. They have 20 acres to farm.
I hope they make it, but there will be a huge adjustment in lifestyle and income if they do. I can assure just about anyone, that the money looks better on paper than it does when actually doing it.
I’m not complaining. I make some money doing it, and could make a lot more by choice. But to make lots of money, seems to mean you have to get big enough to hire lots of labor, or get into Agritainment. Neither of which I want to do. I don’t like managing lots people. It’s not that fun for me. Nor do I want to run a quasi-amusement park.
So I accept lower returns and just farm with my son and I (pretty much). It’s a busy busy time during the season, but I like being outside in the sun. I like pulling up to the gate and looking out over my peach trees, and smelling the clean air. Winters are pretty slow paced, so I can read books, comment on this forum, work on a house project, and work on equipment at a fairly leisurely pace.
There is still lots to do in the winter. I really need to get my deer fence up, but I’m getting older and my attitude is more of, it will get done, when it gets done.
That makes sense, and I think you’re pretty close to capturing the complexity here. There’s a whole host of customer preferences, and there are “need to haves” and “nice to haves”, which don’t necessarily break down into strict organic/nonorganic lines.
My need to have is non-wormy fruit that tastes good, that is free of MAJOR blemishes (I’m okay with minor ones.) If you can do that with organic methods, I’m intrigued. But another of my need to haves is a good price. I’ll pay a bit more for organic, but twice as much? No.
So if you can meet my needs, I’ll be more than happy to buy organic. If not, and conventional meets my needs better, I’ll buy that. IOrganic/nonorganic is a consideration, but there’s probably a decent amount of customers like me for whom organic is just part of the puzzle.
I’ll bite. How do you lose your entire crop of 10-20 acres of potatoes short of late blight? Were they just not paying attention and stuck their potatoes in the ground and never looked at them again until it was time to harvest?
Well, honestly I didn’t mention that to get anyone to bite. In fact, I don’t know all that much of the specifics. I do know she mentioned they don’t currently farm all of the 20 acres. That’s what they have available to farm. I don’t know how many acres of potatoes they had.
She told me they got some manure which was supposed to be organic, but was contaminated with pesticides, which killed their potatoes.
I’m not much of a farmer on root crops, but I know potatoes are related to tomatoes, and tomatoes are very sensitive to herbicides. Also tomatoes, like potatoes are somewhat spotty success here anyway.
A lot of people grow enough tomatoes to give away, but many others try to grow them only to experience disappointment (at least that’s what I get from my customers). Early blight and septoria are generally huge issues here unless you grow them indoors, or spray. My tomato business was pretty good this year (6K) only because most people’s tomatoes failed.
Potatoes I think are even harder because our soil is clay based. It’s been my experience, root vegetables planted in heavy soil are that much more challenged.
I had a neighbor who had an above ground swimming pool with lots of sand. They tore it down and tilled in the sand. Only then were they able to grow decent root vegetables like carrots and potatoes in the spot where the pool was. Any potatoes I’ve ever tried to grow have been poor.
Opea - I really hate SWD. My area suffers from a big SWD problem like your area. Its been a huge problem in the eastern part of my state where roughly $50 million of blueberries are grown.
SWD has also set back many of the advances in Integrated Pest Management made over the last decade.
By the time the SWD show up in the insect traps, they are also in the fruit so a portion or perhaps most of the fruit is ruined. The extension experts in my state now recommend that commercial growers spray for SWD on a regular schedule and forget about monitoring traps and biofix. I hate the fact that most chemicals that are effective against SWD, are also hard on most beneficial insects.
SWD control is contrary to everything I try to practice for insect control on apples.
Penn State discussed the negative impact of SWD on IPM in some detail. I hope the 6 million dollar USDA grant for SWD research will produce results other than rotate effective chemicals and spray on a 5-7 day schedule.
I believe you are correct about SWD finding other host where multiple crops are available. I’m worried that if I control the SWD in the blackberries but don’t spray the peaches they may find their way into the peach or apple orchard which is only 1000 feet away!
Totally true about the IPM and SWD. SWD is sort of like scab (but worse of course) if you know you’ve got it, you better be spraying for it.
I’ve not heard of apples getting SWD, but I don’t grow a lot of apples. It’s pretty easy to see SWD in peaches. If you’ve not seen it before on peaches, they sort of develop this "caved in"spot on the surface. If you dig at the spot, you can see a few tunnels.
The good news is peaches are much easier to protect than blackberries. Blackberries are their favorite fruit here (late raspberries would probably even be more favorite, but few people try to grow raspberries here. Too hot and dry when they ripen.)
I realize that there’s a lot of complexity I don’t deal with, since I just grow fruit for a hobby, not a living. Of the many apples I grow in the humid southeast, Enterprise is the only one that I can grow with almost no spray. This past year all I used was one spray of dormant oil. I just ate another perfect Enterprise from my refrigerator. They are productive, beautiful, store for a long time (3 months for this latest one), and taste good. They certainly aren’t the best tasting apple I grow, but they are super easy.
I wish my customers were that smart! We have sold small fruit to the general public for over 30 years. Unfortunately 90% of my customers don’t have a clue about what it takes to grow produce or even about basic terms like “organic”. They normally focus on appearance or price and I have to score well on both in order to stay in business.
Its surprising that a very small farm like mine requires such a large sales volume to succeed. In order to hit the volume, we must focus on the 90% of normal customers rather than the 10% of sophisticated customers. Its necessary to keep our current customers happy and attract new customers each year.
For example, blackberries demand that I sell at least 5K pounds in just 6 weeks (almost 7000 pints). Even with a mass market focus with good quality and good prices, its hard to generate this sales volume. If we fail to hit our volume targets we work for less than minimum wage!
A good yield on an acre of blackberries is about 15K pounds or about 20,000 pints so we are a long way from our ultimate sales goal. The Blueberry, Apples and Peaches also require a big volume on each acre just to stay in business.
I have learned the importance of economy of scale even on a small farm like mine. Most of my costs are fixed so the difference between selling 3K pounds of blackberries or 10K pounds of blackberries determines if I work for free or make some money. As my sales volume improves, my profit margin improves dramatically.
We see a lot of new growers selling “local”, but fortunately the large establishment costs on perennial crops like blackberries or apples (over 10K/acre) scares most new growers who can not wait 5 or 10 years just to reach break- even. We see a lot of new growers in the local organic market where the entry cost is small. If I grew local corn or tomatoes I might be concerned.