I am at about the 4 year mark with my orchard and would characterize it as a qualified failure. It is certainly starting to bear some fruit, but too many struggles to go into details. I am passionate about high quality fruit, but between a demanding career and a young family, I just don’t have the time or knowhow to turn this into a success. I am fortunate enough though to have the finances to support someone who does. I wanted to gauge if there is any interest for someone in the hobby orchardist community to relocate to Cleveland long term and get paid to practice their hobby. This is a position for a family, not a business and would be super informal and offer maximum flexibility. Essentially, I want to buy a hobby friend who gets to do their hobby and get paid for it while getting all the overhead covered. This could be a seasonal spring/summer employment focused only on the orchard/garden. Alternatively, many members of this community have lots of cool practical skills and the position can include other projects and be a year round thing like an estate caretaker. Job description:
Primary job responsibiliy is to do all things orchard related. I have over an acre allocated and want to maximine the varities and yields it can produce, as well as have a large vegetable garden. I don’t expect a perfectly prim and manicured orchard, and prefer a shaggy food forest type aesthetic. Would also like to have a dozen or two potted citrus and figs that wouldn’t survive our winter outdoors. I do not expect heavy physical labor, any strenuous grunt work can be hired out or power equipment rented. Additional skills, interests, tasks, not necessary, but useful to help cover a salary includes:
fermentation - pickling, wine and cider making or other cooking skills
getting some chickens, dog training etc
other landscaping and outdoor projects - powerwashing, snow plowing etc
home maintanence, plumbing, electrical, carpentry etc
babysitting / driving kids around places
Job Perks:
maximum flexibility - work whenever you want, time off whenever you want
persue your own interests - I’ve got the room and can cover the overhead for whatever fruit you like. I will support your passion project
Requirements:
no formal training necessary, but a proven track record of successfully growing wide variety of fruit in similar setting
clean background since will be around my kids
Questions for the community:
Anybody even remotely interested ? part time or full?
How much $$$ would it take to get you to move to Cleveland?
anything else I can offer to entice someone to consider? What are the deal breakers?
One absolutely needs extensive training to run a profitable orchard. You have to get trees priced for orchard use. about $1.50 per grafted tree. Would you be shipping your produce up and down the Miami/Erie canal on the Cuyahoga river by mule pulled boats.
Not looking to make a profit, in fact I’m prepared to lose a lot of money just to eat fancy fruit. This is not a commercial orchard, I plan to eat it myself, and give away the rest to family and friends. If it’s a runaway successful, maybe sell something at the farmer’s market, but that is not the primary goal. I appreciate the historical Ohio references though
It sounds like a great opportunity for the right person. I would think that your best opportunity would be to find someone locally. Maybe you could contact as many people as possible in that area with interests in fruit and gardening. There should be someone that you could find locally that would do a good job. Master gardeners would be a start. If you can tap into the most active hobby growers in the area they’ll have a network of friends. And they’d be friends and fellow growers who could guide you to a better setup and people to draw from for advice and help.
I consult occasionally for an ~5 acre orchard in this area. The owner was able to find two people locally that have done the orchard work. They have done a good job despite little prior experience. The owner is very happy and the fruit crop is night and day improved. They are planning to plant more trees this winter.
My guess is this is an appealing offer to someone that used to farm successfully but lost the farm; used to have roots, but lost the job and the spouse; and a livable shack or garage apartment is in the deal.
But you have to watch out for freeloaders and also folks like me that are getting too old and slow to do the things you have in mind…even though they can talk the talk.
Good luck.
I’ve been barking up that tree for a while now. I tried going through master gardeners, craigslist, pestering the people at the farmer’s market… No one local seems interested.
Running an orchard is a pretty specialized skill. I don’t think most Master Gardeners are focused on tree fruit from what I have seen in Illinois. I suspect it’s similar in your location. If a local college has an agriculture program you might consider contacting them. They might know of someone that could consult on your orchard or perhaps manage it for you.
An acre is a lot of land for an orchard do you really need (or want) an orchard that big? You might want to go at this from the reverse direction and calculate how much fruit your family will eat fresh, store or process and use per year as a guide to the sizing the orchard. I would double the amount to allow for poor harvests, unproductive varieties etc. A smaller orchard is easier to manage for you or whoever you hire to maintain it. And at your location some tree fruit are just hard to grow, sweet cherries come to mind as an example.
You could also look at buying fruit and having it shipped from places like Andy’s Orchard this is expensive but probably cheaper than hiring someone to manage an orchard.
You may consider that it’s just not a good time in your life to have an orchard. It might be something you wait to do later in life when you have more free time. Or scale back the size and focus on just one fruit type that does well in Ohio like apples. Looking at some of your other posts you may be trying to do too much with too little time which set you up for failures that could be avoided.
At the four year mark I wouldn’t expect to see large successes in any orchard. It takes time for trees to come into bearing. To have early crops you need to have dwarf trees trained to management systems that induce early bearing. Larger trees take more time to bear fruit.
What kind of salary are you offering? What kind of benefits are you offering? Would you be willing to relocate to new location and a new employer if you don’t know what your compensation is?
The problem you will encounter is the really good people are doing it for themselves. The people bad at it would love to continue at your expense. Keeping an orchard is a rare skill few possess now. The best orchardists in my area spent time with the best orchardists then became an orchardist for themselves. In time a really good orchardist has been learning mostly from themelf for 10 - 20 + years. How much does it take to hire an orchardist like @scottfsmith@fruitnut@mamuang@alan@olpea ? The truth is a good orchardist is not available to hire. You could hire a local guy as mentioned and have a consultant like @fruitnut come down and train them. My suggestion is look where people need a job. Where do people need a job and you could afford to pay them? Consider the difficult to employ like people recently locating to the usa or people who may have a bad job history. Sometimes people just need a break in life and would appreciate the work if you supply a place to live and pay them a wage.
Right now, I only have about a 1/3 of an acre actively being used, I have an acre plus sitting dormant, I only mentioned as there is more potential for orchardist to pursue their own projects if interested.
I quickly learned and abandoned all high maintenance and fussy fruits like sweet cherries, but even some of my ‘easier’ fruit like apples and currants aren’t thriving.
You’re right, it’s not a great time to start an orchard, but the problem is that when the time is right, I’ll have to wait 5 years to see anything.
I posted this thread because I don’t really have a good sense of the market for these skills and was hoping to learn how much supply/demand there is and the going rate. Since I have such a wide spectrum of possible arrangements, I was thinking something like ~2-3k a week for a seasonal traveling contract in spring/summer to ~50k for a year round part time contract with lots of vacation. Is that in the ballpark?
This is quite an interesting post. As a retired grower I am the type of person you seem to have in mind. But as I’ve considered how I might be able to market my skills I’ve realized that I have spent a lifetime mostly underpaid (any agricultural worker can confirm that) and generally ignored (ditto).
It was a life I chose for deeper and often intangible rewards, so I don’t regret it. But I now believe that I’m much better off working just for myself and those close to me.
What you are suggesting may seem fair, but it could also feel like another example of the ever growing distance between the economic realities of high and moderate earners. I don’t see how you can avoid that. I don’t doubt your sincerity, but there are wealthy people now who are looking to prepare for a future that may realistically include scarcity of many resources, including quality food. The skills to grow food are ones I see as still undervalued, and since only 1% of the people in this country make their living in agriculture of any kind it will very likely come as a sudden shock for many when those with experience and knowledge are gone.
I hope you can find someone.
Yes. OP may alternatively decide to be less ambitious. A couple of trees of “tried and true” varieties for his area would supply plenty for his family without much muss or fuss. OP or his landscaper guy could easily take care of them.
Gourmet is way overrated. Reliable and fresh is underrated. The difference between a well-grown “Gala” apple ( the easy to grow variety in my area) and some gourmet variety with an unpronounceable name is not that great. The difference between the well grown Gala apple and striking out, is infinite.
Either way, recognize that it’s a hobby. You won’t likely cover costs with a professionally managed orchard.
My opinion is just plant things that don’t need much attention. There are lots of no spray threads as well as others to find easy fruit. Everything but stone fruit will give you a crop without doing anything. Some more than others and it may not be pretty.
I’ve hired a lot of people over the years and most of them turn out to be lazy and unreliable.
Contact your county cooperative extension and ask if they know anyone or of locally involved small farm groups with members in your area. There’s lots of small farms starting up here in NYS owned by people not interested in profit but that get a property tax deferment if they can show receipts for 10 grand annually in produce they’ve grown. Now there are lots of employees of those farms, many who are learning on the fly.
Here in NY there are a couple of organizations that help interns find positions, if your area doesn’t have such things you could also check out linkdin. What you need isn’t a trained orchardist, although that would be nice- just not likely to find. You need a person with enough gardening or small farm experience to show they have that innate intelligence and drive to be good at growing things. Essentially someone with that seemingly rare commodity known as common sense combined with a strong love for plants and hard physical labor.
Also, find the nearest, thriving farmer’s market where multiple growers sell their produce. Talk to them about what you are trying to do, especially anyone selling fruit.
Whether you need full time help depends on the size of your orchard. I personally manage about a 100 different orchards (from a few trees to about 3 acres of fruit trees) and do everything besides spraying all of them with one full-time helper- and I also have 3 acres of a bearing age fruit tree nursery, my own extensive orchard and gardens. But my wife tells me I shouldn’t have to work 7 days a week as I seem to during the growing season. A lot of that is because of my own desire to eat food I grow all year long. If I didn’t do that I could at least take one full day off.
If you find any candidates you can hire me to do a zoom interview and any consultations. My workload is about to finally dial down.
I appreciate your perspective Ged. I agree that farming is hard and an undervalued skill. However, I don’t see small scale fruit farming as a hedge against famine. Industrial farming is too efficient to compete with and necessary to feed 7+ billion people. What we are doing here will remain the domain of the hobbyist.
Strongly disagree koko. Gourmet is the sole reason I’m doing this! Growing Gala is pointless, I can buy those at the market. I want to grow the stuff you can’t buy. I am a dyed in the wool food snob, I can buy fancy wine, fancy cheese, but my passion is good heirloom fruit. It’s one of the few things besides friends and lovers that you can’t buy! I guess that makes 'em more special.
An orchardist may know secrets that make them more succesful than a commercial orchardist. As an example i use full sized trees which in my opinion is a big deal for you because your amount of property. A commercial orchardist has one acre of commercial dwarf pears that are trimmed at 8 feet. Each pear yields 1/3 bushel. For the same space my 30 + feet tall pears yield 1 bushel or more. The foot print of both trees is 8 feet wide. Seems like a small difference until you add it up over an acre or 5 acres or 200 acres. How about we look at 2000 acres of trees in some areas are all dwarfs. Believe it or not most states in the usa grow dwarfs trees. Thats only one trick and your orchard is more productive than it was. The fact is old time orchardists all did what i do but they dont do it anymore. Varieties all yield different amounts duchess d’ angoulme or kieffer produce at least 4x the crop of other better tasting pears like harrow sweet or seckle. There is also an issue of timing Duchess is one of the later types and harrow delight is earlier so its best to plant many such varities staggering the pear crop to come in all season. Disease resistance is a big deal. Why spray and prune all the time? It takes away from picking and fertilizing etc if your always reacting to disease. This is why i say spend the money get a consultant who tells you what i just did about pears. When i planted a few acres of aronia i hired a consultant. We did a video conference i sent him $250 and he gave me a contact that saved me thousands of dollars which easily paid for him. If the county ajent is good you will get expert advice for free. In Kansas they are great on cereal crops but not on fruit. My aronia paid for themselves quickly but then they have since fell out of favor for now. What about a local nursery? frequently their employees are underpaid why not offer one of them.an oppurtunity? You could interview them while shopping for plants.
I think your best bet is to take a step back and reassess what you are doing. It sounds like you have a key requirement (ease of maintenance) but you have not said what you are doing to make it happen. You can want it to be an easy process all day long, but if you then turn around and pick fruits that suffer from an ungodly amount of pest pressure in your area well; you are just working very hard towards sabotaging yourself.
I lived in Maryland for a while. I wanted peaches. I soon realized that with the sort of insect pressure we had it was a constant fight from before the first flower buds appeared. If I wanted ease of maintenance peaches would not be it. Blackberries? Those grew like weeds with no insect pressure and pretty much not a care in the world other than fertilizing, weeding, and thinning them. Heck I could have forego all care and I would still get blackberries.
I bet that if you list where you are and what you are trying to grow it will be obvious why you are struggling to get them to produce in your area. I’m in Alaska, zone 4 with gale force winds in the winter. Even here there is stuff that grows like crazy requiring little care (sour cherries, raspberries, currants, certain apples, and amazingly bunch other stuff), and there are things I keep fighting the good fight because I like a challenge (grapes, hops, certain plums). If your goal is low maintenance every plant choice should reflect that.
You say you have the financial wherewithal, then put it to a good use; develop the expertise, then use it to direct semi-skilled labor to accomplish the tasks. That way you can have your cake and eat it too.
