Northern California (outside of Silicon Valley) should cover most of your requirements. Folsom has an emerging tech scene and has seen decent migration from SV. I won’t call it rural though and the real-estate from what I hear isn’t cheap anymore (although your definition of cheap may vary). There is a spill over effect on real-estate prices until you go more inland or further north. However, this is ONLY optimizing for fruit growing conditions. As Steven mentioned, you may want to consider cost of living, air quality and threat of forest fires (which seems to be a constant every summer these days).
Personally, I’d prefer SoCal compared to the North as I can get in the water most of the year without wet suits or a kayak. I will miss out on high chill fruits, but there are decent low chill varieties available across the board and I can grow some tropicals to compensate Living near the coast and not able to touch the water is such a tease…
CA would work, but then you would be living in CA. Same with OR or WA.
AZ and NV supposedly does a lot to control most natural diseases and lets you have great water control, but you have to be up in the mountains to reduce daytime temps & get chill hours, and water a lot.
Anywhere east of Texas is going to have Eastern diseases, I believe.
I’ve read such. The lower humidity and different climate in the desert supposedly suppress many of them, and the winters are more reliable so you get random freeze disasters less. The Med climate areas in CA, WA, OR also are supposed to do so.
There is supposed to be a reason why so many of the people who talk about how you ‘only need to feed and fertilize your trees right’ and how ‘organic control works perfectly well’ tend to live in the West Coast.
I live a couple miles from one of the oldest sweet cherry trees in the US, the owen cherry tree, planted maybe 1847. I doubt it got sprayed for most if its life. it’s huge and still alive and looks good. I think cherry orchards here do have to deal with cherry fruit fly
my neighbor got a Costco peach tree and planted it, no sprays at all, and got 50 perfect peaches after a couple years. I don’t think he even knew the variety. it’s still alive and doing great but peach leaf curl found it in year three so it doesn’t crop anymore. he could fix it with one or two sprays, I think, if he went with a pro fungicide like ferbam or ziram. the local u-pick peach orchards do great, the worst thing they have seems to be frost or rain disrupting blossoms
growing up in Portland it was easy to find street trees which were plum trees. nobody did anything to them and there were plenty of plums
my neighborhood is full of random fruit trees (in fact, it used to be an orchard) and they’re mostly ignored and become problems because they drop big loads of fruit every year. the ignored apple and pear trees do become hosts of codling moth but that’s only because nobody sprays at all. the plums generally get nothing and produce perfect plums every year (I had one in my side yard that I ignored for five years until I cut it down to be a pluot rootstock). the worst thing they get is aphids. we don’t have plum curculio at all, they don’t come west of the rockies
the Willamette valley is one of the west coast counterparts to Tennessee, in terms of nursery operations. not a ton of large scale tree fruit farms because California and eastern oregon/washington are better still, but still plenty. here’s an old survey:
Tough to kill an apple, cherry, or plum in this neck of the woods. “Feral” trees are everywhere, especially apples. Makes pest control a challenge.
I agree that California is the best overlap between tech and fruit.
I think Boise ID is often overlooked, a location to consider.
Another easy to overlook location is the Tri-Cities in Washington. Pasco, Richland, Kennewick. Big enough to support some tech - lots of engineers - and a great fruit growing location. Lots of agriculture, wine grapes keep expanding, but land is not sky high yet.
What part of Florida are you in? The southern part of the state you can grow; mangos, papayas, bananas, lychee, atemoya, passion fruit, sapodilla the list goes on and on. Most of these fruit are superior to deciduous fruit imo.
Living near the coast and not able to touch the water is such a tease…