Work in the Field— A Means of Learning

The Best Farmers I Know: The Value of Passion and Curiosity

Prior to my calling as an orchardist, my first career was as a software developer. Our company had a technology director at the time who once stated that he valued CQ (curiosity quotient) over IQ (intelligence quotient) when looking for individuals to hire and advance. Over the years that’s stuck with me and I’ve found it to be proven true over and over again. Some of the best folks I know in their respective fields bring their curiosity with them into the job.

Thomas Friedman states this importance in this non-scientific equation: CQ + PQ > IQ; where PQ stands for passion quotient. Passion and curiosity, coupled with a humility of knowing that there’s much you don’t know, is a valuable tool as you begin your journey of learning to grow organic fruit.

Many of the most respected farmers in my network didn’t start as farmers, but rather farming grew out of their interests and passions. They’re a wealth of knowledge because they’ve spent time eagerly learning as much as they could, practicing what they were learning along the way.

Inevitably, this process of learning starts with the “what” and “how” questions:

• What apple varieties are best for this area?

• How far apart do you space your trees?

• What kind of sprays do you use?

• How do you control weeds in your orchard?

Eventually once a foundation of basic knowledge of the “what” and “how” is built, questions should move to the “why”:

• Why this type of rootstock over another? Would you choose it again if you had the chance to start over?

• Why a messy orchard floor over clean cultivation (or vice versa)? What were the risks and deciding factors, and how would that change if you, say, doubled your production acreage?

• Why this type of trellising system and spacing over another?

This is the goal of the apprenticeship and experience in the field: establishing a base of knowledge (“what” and “how”), then determining the best approach for your orchard (“why”). If you’re reading this book, chances are you’re already curious about the orchard. Bring that curiosity out into the field as you embark on the next two steps of your training to become an orchardist: apprenticeship and test plots.

My Apprenticeship

As a young grower in 2014, before we purchased our land, I worked for a commercial farm and orchard for a full growing season. I certainly could have worked longer and learned more, but the experience of a growing season took me through a typical orchard year, starting with winter work and pruning on through harvest. The orchard I worked for grew fruits and vegetables conventionally (that is, with synthetic fertilizers and synthetic chemical sprays) but had branched out into some of the fruits I planned to grow, including kiwi berries, and therefore matched some of my orchard aspirations. I knew enough about organic orchards at the time to know that pome fruits and stone fruits were out of my league in my current ability to grow, so unusual fruits were my planned niche.

My Lessons Learned Through Apprenticeship

I learned so much through my experience at a commercial orchard that it can be difficult, especially when the experience is approaching a decade removed, to distill it into distinct points. Here are my takeaways when viewed through the lens of starting my own orchard shortly after the apprenticeship.

The Physical Demands of Orchard Work

Orchard work is physically demanding, and if you’re just getting started, mentally overwhelming as well. If you’re a backyard hobby orchardist who is considering commercial production, working in a commercial orchard provides good proving grounds to know if what you love as a hobby will translate to a rewarding calling. Some hobbies are best kept as hobbies and the transition to a commercial setting can remove some of the initial luster of a potential new career.

Coming from a desk job, my first weeks full-time outdoors meant a huge physical adjustment period. I drove home from the orchard very tired for weeks, if not months, until my body adjusted. This is normal for anyone transitioning from a non-physical vocation to a physically demanding one. I now joke that my main job is to move things around all day, which isn’t too far from the truth.

Thinking Ahead and Operating at Scale

For someone who hasn’t grown up in and around orchards, it’s incredibly valuable to learn about growing at scale (that is, large or commercial-size production) and to begin to think about all of the moving pieces involved. For example, commercial orchards plan out their new plantings years in advance, often placing orders for grafted trees 3-4 years ahead of when they expect to receive them.

As an orchardist, you must be able to plan and think years in advance:

• What steps do I need to take over the coming days, months, and years, to ensure that my planting and establishment years are a success?

• How do I need to prepare the land?

• When do I need to have pieces of infrastructure in place to support the planting (irrigation, harvest, packaging, storage, and cooling)?

• How will I deal with the seasonal labor demands of this crop?

• What are my plans for marketing this fruit once the trees start to bear?

This is just a selection of the types of questions you’ll need to developer answers to as you begin your planting.

Thinking in Terms of Systems

The Balanced Organic Systems in play for pest management, weed control, fertility, and irrigation among others in a backyard orchard often don’t translate well when growing at commercial scale. While it’s critical that you begin to see your organic orchard as a complex web of an ecosystem with many interdependent strands at play, it’s equally as critical to understand the strands that make up that web and how you can influence them.

It’s been said before in this text but it bears repeating. There is a tendency, especially among young orchardists (myself included), to look for silver bullet solutions to orchard problems. We think that if we just get the right mix of biodiversity in the orchard, or have the perfect balance of fertility in our soil, that it will solve all of our problems. That’s a silver bullet solution, and it isn’t true. That’s not to discount biodiversity or soil fertility, but a healthy orchard consists of more than just those two Systems.

During your apprenticeship time, look at the different Systems in operation there (organic or otherwise) and evaluate how successful they are: Does the orchard spend an inordinate amount of time on addressing a certain issue, be it weeds or other pests? What’s the cause of the extra time spent? Could that issue be addressed differently, or eliminated through a different practice or planning? Better yet, are there Systems that run so smoothly or seamlessly that they aren’t even a concern? How did the orchardist arrive at that way of operating? Constant curiosity is one of the keys to making your apprenticeship a useful one.

The orchard I worked for spent a lot of time addressing weeds under the trees, as do most orchards in the Northeast. A significant amount of time was spent going up and down each row spraying down emerging weeds. It led me to think about my own orchard and how I would address the problem of weed control. Would I allow for a messy orchard floor as some advocate? Would I rely on the limited options available to me as an organic orchardist? Or would I try some other means of management like cultivation? Simply wishing that weeds wouldn’t be a problem or pushing off the decision until it became a problem wasn’t an option. For better or worse, I eventually settled on utilizing woven black plastic mulch as a way to both reduce competition for my new plantings and suppress weeds.

Time Management

Properly managing your time in an orchard is critical.

First, there are ebbs and flows to the work. Some weeks are much more busy than others, so it’s critical that you know what needs to be done and how long it will take. Second, there are some tasks that are time-critical in the orchard, meaning you may only have a relatively short window in which they can be accomplished. Third, weather and the circumstances of life can throw a wrench into the first two points, so be prepared to be flexible.

In our first year or so it was just me in the orchard and there was a bunch to do (or so it seemed to me at the time). At the beginning of each off season, I’d sit down and create a master todo list with deadlines and the amount of time I thought the tasks would take, and then assigned the task to a particular week. With some spreadsheet trickery, I was able to schedule out my winter to ensure that no given week was overloaded with tasks. It was a great exercise in time management. In the spreadsheet as well was a column for the actual time it took to complete each task. Seeing my sometimes overly generous, sometimes overly optimistic estimated times next to the actual time it took for each task was as helpful as it was eye-opening, and ultimately helped me to manage my time better in the off seasons that followed.

Forging Connections and Relationships

An internship or apprenticeship also allows you to begin to forge relationships and connections in your industry. Where do you go when you need to pick up miles of trellis wire, or how do you go about finding hundreds of trellis posts? Who can you call if you have a question on spray materials? Do you have someone to call to bounce your latest and greatest idea off of? Along with knowledge and practical experience, relationships are among the most valuable things gained from working at an orchard. Forge relationships and be prepared to pass along the same generosity of time with others.

Relationships can happen outside of apprenticeships as well. Conferences with like-minded growers are great ways to connect, as are organizations devoted to your area of interest. Groups like NAFEX (North American Fruit Explorers) and Growers’ associations can also work to connect you to like-minded folks. I was introduced to Jim, or rather learned of Jim, through an interaction with a member of Penn State’s Young Grower Alliance. I contacted Jim and we spoke by phone before meeting in Jim’s organic orchard and so our connection was made. Look for possible connections and then reach out to establish perhaps a lifelong opportunity for learning. You will be surprised how many people are more than willing to help you if you are bold enough to ask for help.

How will you Market Your Fruit?

The grower I worked for was an excellent grower as well as marketer. He had invested years in establishing his farm’s presence at farmer’s markets. He also had relationships with the local apple packers and processors for a portion of his fruit as well as some wholesale arrangements with local farm markets and other sellers. With a good-sized vegetable operation thrown in the mix and the addition of shelf-stable products, he offered a wide array of produce to his customers in lucrative markets in northern Virginia and the District of Columbia. It was worth his effort to make the weekly trip to these markets because they offered a premium price for his growing efforts.

I’ll confess, it was all a little overwhelming to me. Markets like those he attended meant that he spent a lot of time sorting and packing produce to get it ready, then loading it with forklifts onto a big box truck at 4 AM on a Saturday, spending a long day at market, then packing up the remainder and unpacking back at the farm that which could be salvaged. Those were lucrative hours for sure, but it meant that all weekends from June through November were tied up at markets.

Farmers markets offer an opportunity to command a good price for your produce and an opportunity to sell a lot in a short window of time. Markets necessitate a lot of supporting equipment: box trucks or large vans, forklifts and pallets, and tables, tents, and signage. Labor-wise they represent a significant cost to sort and pack produce, transport it to market, unpack and display it, potentially re-pack what didn’t sell, drive back to the farm, then unpack what didn’t sell and see whether it’s worth salvaging. Add to that the costs of staffing the market and paying any associated market fees. Also consider that most markets take place at times that are convenient to your customers (nights and weekends) and throw in the complicating factor of weather. All of this should be considered before jumping in.

In the end, we decided to first market our produce at our roadside stand, via u-pick, and small local wholesale accounts. These have their own pluses and minuses, but with a young family we didn’t want to spend every weekend during the summer at a market.

Organic versus Conventional Apprenticeships

Some might question the wisdom of working for a conventional orchard when your intent is to grow organic. Certainly if there are established successful organic orchards in your same sort of climate, growing the types of things you want to grow, at the scale you wish to grow at (or greater), those are preferable to their conventional counterparts. However the issue persists in much of the Mid Atlantic and New England that there just aren’t very many organic orchards in the region (something this book aspires to remedy). Moreover, many of the Systems at work in a conventional orchard also need to be executed in the organic orchard, so not all is lost. For example, the trellising of fruit trees in an organic orchard looks much the same as that in a conventional orchard. Though the type of posts and the spacing of the trees may differ, the mechanics and much of the equipment remain the same.

Finally, it’s uncharitable to lump all conventional orchards together. Conventional orchards have a reputation for spraying through the season to manage orchard pests. Most spray with good reason: it’s quite a challenge to grow marketable tree fruit at all in the Mid Atlantic, let alone grow organically. Most growers, conventional and otherwise, would prefer to not spray at all if possible. I personally know growers that go to significant lengths to spray as little as possible or to choose a “softer” alternative spray when given the option, not just due to cost, but because they care for the land they’re stewarding.

The grower I worked for employed someone to scout for him. To my knowledge, the scout was a retired gentleman from Penn State’s fruit lab and did this on the side. His job was to scout the orchard and look for buildups of pests or warning signs in areas of the orchard, then advise the grower as to what to spray and how much. From my recollection, the idea was that the scout would end up saving the grower from unnecessary sprays such that the savings would more than cover the scouting fees. I presume there were thresholds for the decisions on whether or not to spray, though in all honesty I don’t think I knew enough at the time to ask intelligent questions as to what triggered a spray versus waiting. All this to emphasize the point that conventional growers aren’t looking to spray for the fun of it as each application they make costs them money as well as their valuable time.

There’s so much to be learned from organic and conventional growers alike, so as a beginning organic grower please have the humility to know that there is much to be learned from our conventional counterparts, many of whom have grown up in the orcharding community and are a wealth of knowledge.

Test Plots - Gaining Experience on Your Own Land

Apprenticing for a commercial orchard is one of the most important steps to preparing yourself to operate your own orchard. Even so, the commercial orchard you work for may be generations old while you’re just getting started, they may be growing different crops or varieties than what you’re considering, and they likely have infrastructure that you, at first, won’t. How do you gain experience when you’re still not ready to jump into a full commercial-sized planting?

Proof-of-Concept (Testing your Systems)

There’s much to be said for backyard orchards and small acreage plantings. Consider them a proof-of-concept. From your current fairly limited experience you may have an idea of the systems that need to be in place to operate your organic orchard. You have good conceptual ideas of how you’ll manage pest pressure, deal with weeds, and implement irrigation. Use a small-scale setting to prove them out. Proving (or disproving) your designs on smaller scales comes with a much smaller price tag than putting in an acre of fruit trees only to realize a significant (and therefore often costly) flaw in your design.

Test Plots as a Proof-of-Concept

To execute this proof-of-concept, consider implementing a test plot. A test plot is a scaled-down orchard planting, done in layout of your planned commercial planting with the varieties of fruit you hope to grow. A test plot should be viewed as a proof-of-concept for your eventual orchard design. It doesn’t need to be perfect (believe me, it won’t be), but it should reflect the best practices of the learning you’ve done to date. The goal of the test plot is to both prove out the organic systems approach that you want to put in place in your larger-scale orchard and develop an accurate picture of the level of commitment of time it will take to execute your eventual design. Be intentional and note how long different activities in the orchard take, how they could be done better, and think critically about how what you’re doing now would need to change if it were scaled to 100x your current size. Make lots of mistakes on a small scale (and learn from them!) to minimize them at a larger scale.

Sizing Test Plots

A test plot should be sized large enough that the thought of managing it makes you slightly uncomfortable. That will vary by grower. For a beginning grower interested in apples, that might mean five trees each of five different varieties. Make it large enough that hand-weeding becomes burdensome and spray applications with a backpack sprayer seem a bit daunting. For an established commercial grower looking to test the water with organic, anything less than an acre planting might seem to be a waste of time.

It’s relatively easy to get a hold of handfuls of a single variety of fruit tree without needing to place an order for custom-grafted trees by the hundreds or thousands, so planning doesn’t need to happen years in advance. However, ensure that the rootstock and trellising system for your trees matches that which you intend to use in your eventual full-scale orchard.

Operating and Learning From Test Plots

Operate your test plot in the same way you plan to operate a larger planting. Using your acquired knowledge to date and the guidelines of this book, operate your plots for a few growing seasons. Take detailed notes on successes and failures and reflect on them during the off-season to plan for the following year. Always keep in mind the eventual goal: to use the knowledge and experience gathered now to segway into a commercial-sized operation.