Family Tree Farms is a 10,000 acre family fruit growing business headquartered in Reedley, CA. Their test orchard has varieties from at least 28 breeding programs from around the world with 1,000 varieties. Weekly in summer they have tastings similar to the ones I attended when I lived nearby. Dave Wilson nursery had a test block in Reedley and had tastings open to the public from May thru August. My primary complaint was the fruit at the tastings was at the stage of commercial harvest. Mostly way too green to pick out the winners.
Family Tree Farms does reduce water prior to harvest to increase brix. And they have converted from furrow to drip, which in my opinion, might reduce over watering.
I do think FTF tries hard to sell the best stone fruit possible.
Their stone fruit is mostly trellised at about 17x9 ft. Mostly double wall trellis.
Those are some impressive numbers. I can’t imagine setting up a good tasting program with numbers like that and considering how tasting is partially subjective.
Considering it has rained here once or twice a week for most weeks of the summer and now fall, this quote highlights an option I don’t have:
“Family Tree Farms does reduce water prior to harvest to increase brix.”
Anything fruit that was tasty in my garden this summer was a strong winner.
“Family Tree Farms”. Are those farms that can only be obtained by family inheritance because huge scale is the only way to enter the market place. That company has 3rd generation ownership. Fruit aristocrats. You mention that the quality was diminished from early picking, but early picking is efficient picking of fruit that bruises less from handling and keeps on shelves long enough after the time it takes to distribute.
I’m glad that CA also has a thriving farmer’s market movement. My sister who lives just north of Eureka buys her peaches and Nects from a nearby grower, inland from her where there’s enough sun to grow high quality stone fruit. The grower didn’t inherit a huge “farm operation”. He makes a modest living doing what he loves using his own hands to harvest fruit at peak ripeness.
Yesterday I was picking prune plums, feeling every one before pulling from the tree to assure perfect ripeness. I’m glad that’s not how I make my living, but I do respect small growers that do and if I didn’t grow my own I’d buy theirs.
There are a few smaller growers that specialize in high-brix fruit and ship… if you are able to afford it. I think Frog Hollow is one- they are a 280 acre operation. That’s about mid-size, right?
There are also high end markets in my wealthy region that have pretty good fruit sold as “tree ripened” at a premium. I even bought a box of very high-brix nectarines from Costco on a season of personal crop failure… the problem is inconsistency and a lack of varietal definition- the next box I got from them was a low acid white with maybe 17 brix, which isn’t quite high enough without the acid for me. The yellow acidic ones had to be in the 25 range. Someday maybe they will come up with a flavor code that defines sugar and acidity that can be accomplished by computer driven robotics.
Steven, Family tree farm company is certainly a fruit growing monster in the state of California and many fruit breeding companies from Spain and other countries have a commercial relationship with Family Tree Farm , and breeders rootstocks as the company Agromillora (
world leader in dwarfing rootstocks, suitable for super-intensive technical agriculture, with presence in California), to breeders such as Viveros Provedo with whom they have commercial relationships,
I really admire the Family Tree Farm company, but there is one thing I don’t like , and is that they change the real names of the varieties
and in this way, it is a bit misleading to the American population, who thinks that are varieties obtained by Family Tree Farm.
This photograph and his comment in Good Fruit Grower
Family Tree Farms’ research orchard sits just outside the tasting room, where Wuhl runs trials with 4,000 individual trees consisting of 1,000 varieties from 28 breeders on 20 rootstocks. Here, he inspects the growth of a mottled plumcot named “Flavor Gator"
And the plumcot Flavor Gator is a plum variety from the Watermelom plums range of the Israeli breeder Ben Dor Fruits.
Richard, yes it is a company with great passion and also with a great business economically speaking.
Alan, for a commercial plantation of those dimensions (I have friends in Spain with similar farms), you cannot harvest the fruit in the optimal state of ripeness on the tree, since the fruit would suffer a lot of damage in the sorting machine, and would have a useful life post-harvest extremely short .
For this reason, they select fruit varieties from the best breeders whose varieties, in the point of commercial ripening , with great firmness, offer excellent taste qualities, such as the different varieties of stone fruit from Provedo’s “Extreme” flavor line.
They’re testing 1,000 varieties trying to determine which have the most potential for commercial production in their operation. I’d guess that they actually grow a couple of hundred, maybe more. Which isn’t that many considering all the different types and the long season.
I have long understood the goals of breeders that seem to have started with the Elephant Heart plum, which does get high sugar while still pretty firm and keeps a very long time if harvested firm and sweet. I also appreciate what such attempts have brought about, although these sweet firm fruit have a great tendency to crack in the humid regions, which I assume is why Adams County Nursery (major U.S. East coast commercial supplier) has stopped selling pluots after raving about them for a few years.
I cannot grow Flavor Grenade pluots in my orchard because I’m in such a humid spot, I think, but where I’ve grafted it on trees I’ve planted in a couple of other orchards it has done very well in a very limited but highly appreciated way. My tree only gave me a good crop on one season out of 8 and died on its 9th.
I look forward to other pluots coming off patent, at least the ones that are not highly susceptible to bacterial spot, as many seem to be.
When breeders didn’t exist and new varieties were lucky seedlings it was something like one in a few thousand chance seedlings that were good enough to graft to other trees and picked up by nearby growers where they were picked up by other growers and so on. .
Hi Oregon Fruit Grow.
It doesn’t seem like an excessive 1.000 varieties under evaluation.
Please note the following.
They need to produce early, mid-season and late harvest varieties of all types of stone fruit (apricots, cherries, white-fleshed peaches, yellow-fleshed peaches, flat white and yellow-fleshed peaches, yellow-skinned peaches, nectarines white and yellow-fleshed , European and Japanese type plums, pluots and plumcots, Apriums, etc…).
So 1,000 varieties under evaluation almost seems like a small amount to me.
They don’t. But the number of trees in a breeding program is a power series and becomes large over time. It often lasts multiple human generations due to the maturation period of trees. Quite different from annual crops. The upside to the power series is there is a maximum expansion and then quite a bit of culling occurs as the breeder(s) narrow in on the objective. One of my relatives designed the mandarin breeding program in 1905 for what is now UCR. It reached its zenith shortly before he retired in 1945. In the 1980’s “Gold Nugget” was selected.
It’s worth supporting the small growers. " Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. They paved paradise."
The peach farm about 5 miles from me is now a Condo development. The 10 acre corn field that was two blocks from where I worked in now Apartments. The small farm stand a few blocks from me is now gone. The local produce distributor that would have a weekend market in their parking lot, with their best produce, was sold and that ended. There are farms and stands east of me but they cater to tourists since it is a novelty. There are traffic jams so I stay away in the summer and on the weekend.
You may have missed my point, Richard. That is that corporate sized farms are very, very expensive. Not that Bill Gates can’t own more farmland than anyone else in the world, he does, and without inheriting them, but when a multi-million dollar farm operation is 3rd generation, that means something to me about the state of agriculture in this country, for better or for worse.
