10 Lessons from Starting an Organic Orchard
by Tim Clymer
Looking back on our relatively new and short journey at Threefold Farm, I’m amazed at how far we’ve come (with a lot of helpers!) in such a short period of time. Every year of this journey has been instrumental in teaching us and preparing us for the coming years. We’ve made lots and lots of mistakes out of ignorance, often stemming from a lack of knowledge. Allow me to try to summarize these lessons in order to save you time and frustration.
1. Become a Student of Your Orchard Site
When you choose your final orchard site, you begin the long process of learning from it. No, this isn’t some process where you ask the land what it has to say and wait for an audible reply. I’m talking about the patient and sometimes silent process of carefully observing land over the course of many seasons. This is certainly not a full list, but here are some study areas you might want to consider:
If you planted cover crops, consider how they are growing throughout the season: which areas flourish and which grow poorly?
Areas that flourish may require less soil amendments, compost, and/or fertilizer than the spaces that struggle. A soil test of those scraggly areas can help to identify deficiencies.
Consider how water flows on your property. Which areas hold water after heavy rains and for how long? Which areas of your property dry out first during a period of little rain?
Water-logged soils will fail to grow fruit trees. Can the soil structure and drainage be improved over time through cover cropping? Or will you need to resort to more drastic measures like drain tile? Or is it so swampy that fruit trees are best planted elsewhere?
After the first frost, look at the field. Which areas were affected, which weren’t?
Row orientation, slope, sun, wind, windbreaks, and other factors can make it so that cold weather events affect different corners of the same property quite differently. An early look at frost patterns after the first frost can help the farmer to identify the more vulnerable areas of a farm. Tree fruits that bloom early or are subject to frost damage can then be planted in areas that are less prone to freezing.
On a windy day, walk around the property and see which areas are the most sheltered and which are the most exposed.
Wind and breeze can help dry out orchard sites and suppress disease but it can also damage plants and trellising systems when in excess.
2. Begin with Humility and Learn from Others
Orcharding is a lifelong endeavor, and as I’ve mentioned before, you only get one chance per year to grow the perfect apple or peach. With that in mind, approaching the orchard with a posture of humility is not only the best, but probably the most honest approach.
Can I be very straightforward with you (and myself)? You don’t have all the answers, though you may be tempted to think you do. You don’t know what you don’t know. And what you don’t know can be very costly in terms of time, effort, and real dollars, when you make ill-informed decisions. So how can you remedy that?
Much of the joy that I get from this vocation is the ability to learn and grow by interacting with other orchardists and farmers. There’s a certain joy that comes from a posture of humility and willingness to learn from others who are more experienced and knowledgeable than you.
So go to that conference, attend yet another webinar, visit other orchards, learn from your employees and the gifts they bring to your farm. I emphasize this point as much to my current self as to you new orchardists out there.
3. The Orchard is as Much About Business as it is About Growing
Many young farmers start with a passion for growing things. I did too. Their focus and mine was primarily on becoming a really good grower. And that’s certainly necessary, but it’s only part of the picture.
The business aspect of the farm, I’m sorry to say, was almost an afterthought. If you grow a good product, people will somehow find out and beg to buy what you’re selling, right? No. Farms must invest and focus as much or more on the business and marketing portion of their operation as much as they do in their effort to grow great produce. A farm that neglects this truth will fail.
Learn more about how to run your orchard business in our section, The Orchard as a Business.
4. Find Your Niche
The agricultural world is very competitive. In many ways, you’re growing something akin to a commodity, a raw material sold for close to the cost of production. Therefore it’s very important that your product be different from your competitors in some way: in what you grow, in how you grow it, in how and to whom it’s marketed, etc. In some ways, you’re always competing with the convenience and price point set by grocery stores and their growers. How will you stand out and command a price point that will allow your farm to thrive and grow? In many markets, certified organic fruit may be enough of a differentiator. In markets saturated with many organic growers, or in communities with little money or little demand for organic food, you may need to stand out in another way.
Threefold Farm is situated in an area that’s one of the top five apple producing regions in the country. We’re located on limited acreage relative to the hundred-plus-acre apple and peach orchards nearby. We needed to grow crops that would stand out in our market. We also needed to make sure that the competitive pressure for lower and lower prices wouldn’t be too fierce for our farm to be able to survive and grow. Considering all of this, we decided on a mix of unique fruits like figs, pawpaws, and kiwi berries.
5. Measure, Observe, and Learn Constantly
As a young farmer you have fairly little knowledge to draw on. The lessons taught by a growing season are valuable only if you take the opportunity to observe. Measuring harvest, timing how long tasks take to accomplish, and collecting other important metrics can help take the guesswork out of important management decisions. We try to spend a significant portion of our time gleaning what we can from our fields as well as from a variety of other resources (conferences, webinars, articles, YouTube, books) in order to make our farm run more smoothly.
I almost always carry a little waterproof notebook (‘Rite in the Rain’, in case you’re curious) so that I can make notes throughout the day specific to the crop I’m working on. Don’t rely on your memory to carry your thoughts through an entire season. When you’re writing notes, you’re speaking to your future self, so write in a way that clearly shares what you want your future self to know. Be specific! Later, at farm meetings, we can discuss these observations and change up our practices.
At Threefold Farm, we grow a lot of unique fruits that aren’t heavily commercialized, like pawpaws. This has a variety of benefits and drawbacks that I won’t fully elaborate on here. One drawback that I will highlight is a lack of yield information for a crop like pawpaws. There are small studies that look at the average number and relative size of fruit from the trees, but these are limited in scale. What these studies lack, we need to supplant with good record-keeping on yields (via our harvest logs) and field notes about particular varieties. This measurement and observation can begin to give us a clearer picture of which varieties are performing well (and which varieties therefore deserve to be planted in greater numbers) versus those that perform poorly (and might need to be replaced with better-producing varieties).
6. Things will Take Longer Than You Expect
This may just be a result of my personality, but in the first few years, I had the unfortunate tendency to underestimate how long different projects and efforts would take on the farm. Much of this underestimation stemmed from a lack of experience. Know that many of your initial ideas will take far longer in implementation than you anticipate. If you’re planning on manual labor as a primary means to implement practice, consider alternatives that are less labor intense.
Consider the example of installing our orchard perimeter fence. I had installed some fencing before and knew the basics steps involved, but it certainly wasn’t a daily activity for me. Add to that a few additional factors: fencing on uneven terrain, needing to work around trees, joining sections of fence together, and working alongside some folks who were very eager to help but also didn’t have fencing experience. I hoped to have nearly a mile of woven wire fence put up in a week. We got a surprising amount done considering our lack of experience and minimal equipment, but the work to finish everything and call it “done” took another two to three weeks. Through that experience and others I learned that my estimations tended to be overly optimistic. Therefore if a project is new to me, I tend to estimate that it’ll take much longer than my initial estimates. With a little more experience under your belt, you’ll find that your estimates fall in line with reality.
7. Preferences Need to be Constrained by Pragmatism (or Reality?)
I’ll never spray, I’ll never use black plastic, I’ll never use a fossil fuel burning tractor, I’ll only sell my produce within an X mile radius of the farm.
Preferences are fine, but consider the implications. Weed pressure won’t go away just because you don’t like black plastic, and the cost in manual labor to hand-weed an orchard of even moderate size is too high. So what’s your plan? Hoping the weeds won’t be too bad isn’t an option because it isn’t realistic (at least for the eastern US).
Consider spraying as another example. We would prefer not to spray any products on the orchard, and we do as much as we can culturally to minimize the need to spray. That said, we still do employ some organic sprays strategically to help increase the percentage of saleable fruit coming out of our orchard. Once again, thinking that pests won’t be of concern because you’ve chosen not to spray isn’t a plan, it’s a hope.
Consider what your preferences may cost you and your business before wholeheartedly embracing them.
8. Be Proactive versus Reactive
Many tasks in the organic orchard are time-critical. A task like weeding that’s put off for a few days or weeks may end up costing ten times more in labor than if it had been attended to on time.
The organic orchard requires thoughtful planning ahead and early consideration of the consequences of delayed decisions. Conversely, if you find yourself reacting to situations in the orchard, consider what you could have done in advance to address the issue and make notes for later follow-up.
An example of this from Threefold Farm would be our ever-evolving use of woven black plastic for weed prevention. In our very first planting of brambles like raspberries and blackberries, we were constantly playing catch-up. We planted our brambles and then later added plastic to prevent weeds from choking them out. This not only led to a poor establishment year for our brambles, it also meant that putting the plastic down was far more of a chore than it would have been early on. We had to mow or string trim around the weeds, then be careful not to injure any tender emerging shoots. What could have taken less than an hour per row now took several hours and needed to be followed up to eliminate the weeds that survived the process. Have you heard the expression ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’? That certainly would have applied here.
9. Employees Are an Investment in Your Farm
At first on our farm, in order to save money, we primarily relied on our own labor. Instead of seeing an employee as a way to advance the farm at a faster pace, we viewed them as costs that we could do without for the time being. However, an employee can greatly distribute the workload on the farm and allow you to make significant strides versus relying solely on the owner’s labor.
Our first employee helped us to catch up on work that sorely needed to be done. They also brought a fresh perspective to the farm. They allowed us to advance the farm timeline toward maturity much faster than if we had insisted on doing the work ourselves. How valuable is it to gain a year or two of growth when you’re dealing with slow-maturing perennial plantings?
10. You Can’t Labor Your Way Out of a Problem
In your orchard, labor is likely to be one of your biggest expenses. This is especially true on organic farms. Out of control labor costs will greatly diminish your farm’s ability to survive and grow. When you encounter a problem in your orchard, your go-to solution should not be more labor. In fact, the design of your orchard from the start should work to minimize labor.
As an example, consider the design of our orchard as it relates to mowing. We knew mowing would be a necessity, but mowing is time-intensive and doing it doesn’t add value to our fruit. Therefore we even carefully chose the grass species we grow to a mix that is designed for orchards and vineyards and requires less mowing. We also designed our layout such that all areas are mowable by a large mower and no string-trimming or push-mowing is required. Weed-eating and push-mowing are just less efficient ways of cutting grass. Any “extra” areas that we have to mow are turned into small test plots for new cultivars, transforming what would be additional mowing time into useful research space that no longer needs to be mowed.
There’s a quote I like from Elon Musk that says something to the effect of “the best part is no part, the best design is no design”, speaking to the unnecessary complexity that engineers often introduce into designs. If I might risk paraphrasing for the farm, “the best labor is no labor.” No labor on a farm isn’t realistic, but working to minimize it is essential.
Concluding Thoughts
In some ways, this list serves to catalog the mistakes I’ve made, and that I’ve hopefully learned from, during my journey as an organic orchardist. I expect in 10 years I may have another 10 lessons learned, and I may laugh at these first ones.
If you’re an orchardist now, which lessons have been most valuable to you? What do you wish you could go back and tell your beginning orchardist self?