I get a kick out of people growing organic vegetables and stuff. They would have to stand on the Bible to tell me that they don’t use something else. The good growers didn’t let the pesticides get out of control. If people didn’t understand what the pesticide would do, they ruined their soil with it. Cliff Emlong
Bloomingdale [
I’m sorry to say that the fruit industry is going downhill, especially for this area. They’re going into other types of farming like vegetables, where they were mainly fruit growers. Tree fruit ha[s] gone to vegetables and they’re doing very well. But that takes a lot of capital, too. Harold Fox
Back many years ago, you stood on top of the spray rig with a gun in your hand and you sprayed everything. Then they came out with those speed sprayers and you’d run those off the tractor, and some of them had engines and some of them would run off the tractor. [If the wind was blowing on you], you wore a mask.
[Pesticides] changed over the years but even when I was just a kid, we still had [them]. We had sulfur and arsenate lead and that type of stuff, and they’d interchange. The sulfur was for spraying the leaves so they wouldn’t get a disease - particularly apples. The arsenate lead was a poison to kill worms and bugs and stuff that got into the fruit. They had several different kinds [that have been] banned. It’s changed a whole lot over the years. [Even though pesticides were] quite expensive, you had to protect your fruit. George Glade
Oh boy, it breaks my heart when I see what’s happening out in our area here;
The weather raises havoc with the fruit. We’ll get a freeze [that] decimate[s] peaches for a few years and it comes back. Now, we’re in the cycle [of] that weather. Peaches aren’t a profitable crop in
He [my son] switched from apples to grapes. Fire blight devastated a lot of the orchards one year and he didn’t like apples. So he pulled out a hundred and fifty acres of apples and planted grapes. [He] hasn’t got that many grapes yet, but he’s planting.
Don’t ask me what the countryside is going to be in the next twenty years because it’s really changed. Used to be you’d drive down some road and [find] one farm after another. [They were] as neat as a pin, planted, and really taken care of. Now there are abandoned orchards just sitting there and a lot of open land, or they’re growing corn or soybeans on it. Fruit isn’t all that exciting any more. Bernard Herman
Here in
From the mid-1800s on, you were controlling insects and diseases by spraying them with heavy metals like copper, lead, arsenic, or organic compounds that we could take from plants like nicotine or pyrethrum, which comes from chrysanthemums, or rotenone, which is a fish poison and also an insecticide. It poisoned all the insects and everyone would be covered by arsenate of lead. The arsenate of lead would break down, but you still had arsenic and lead in the ground. Areas that have been in fruit production for a long, long time still have high levels of arsenic and lead.
There are people who – essentially, usually berry growers, blueberry growers or raspberry growers – [who] are planting currants and gooseberries now. They’re very small growers because, essentially, you have to find the market and usually when you find the market, they’ll pay an awful lot of money for gooseberries. They’re very hard to find. Currants and gooseberries are native to
The fruit belt is along the east side of
Instead of using literally pounds of material per acre, it’s a matter of two or three ounces per acre. The trees are all green and orchards look completely different now than they did fifty years ago. Technology has been marvelous and the, you know, fruit growers continue to be very concerned with minimal use of chemicals. Technology has made that very possible. Russell Mawby
The two- or three-hundred miles along the west
Well, we would start strawberry season right here in
Back in those days, there w[ere]n’t many chemicals that farmers used. Probably just five or something; sulfur, and poison, lime, copper, and that’s about all they needed. That’s all they used. Now, we probably have closer to two hundred different kinds of chemicals. We have a chemical for every bug. We handle over a hundred and fifty chemicals. The government got strict, and you had to be careful how much you used. Before, it was just pour it on the trees. Nobody died back then either but they still used stronger chemicals than they do now. Now, farmers have to show us that they spray with the processors every year.
They t[ook] off so many good chemicals. They took off ALAR. Our ALAR made an apple hard like it came right off the tree and kept it that way - like a McIntosh [that] gets real soft. [ALAR] kept it hard. They took [ALAR] off because they said it caused cancer. Anything cause[s cancer]. Salt and sugar will cause cancer if you [e]at a ton of them at one time. Same way with this stuff here.
In those days, there w[ere]n’t big farms. Now they[‘ve] got a thousand acre, four-hundred acres, three-hundred acre farms. Back in those days, the largest farm was eighty acres. Most of them had forty-acre farms. Sheldon Radom
One of the points of contention now is [that] our government allows us to import food that they wouldn’t let the homegrown people grow [using] certain pesticides. That gets into politics. But we had to stand our ground and we wanted to. We wanted to stay legal. We were part of [the] National Grape Coop and, I’m tellin’ you, they were very strict on the herbicides and fungicides, and the pesticides that they would allow their growers to use.
With the fruit,
Growers [and] processors are extremely conscious of how to manage pests with the minimum pesticide inputs. That’s a real focus of everyone, and they’re doing just a tremendous job compared with when my dad started farming in the [19]50s. We know more about the biology of all of our pests, and that gives us the ability to target [and] control them less harshly. So, we learn to be more specific in controlling what it is that we need to control and not damage the rest of the ecosystem. Glenn Rogers
We had strawberries, and then after the strawberries usually came, usually very close together, currents and tart cherries. And then after that, came plums and sweet cherries. And then after the cherries, currents, plums, and the tart cherries, we would get into peaches. Mostly, they were fresh peaches and canning peaches that we would sell. Then after peaches, of course, we would get into apples. During that whole time, we would still [be] picking tomatoes. We would pick tomatoes for the fresh market early in the season, and we would pick canning tomatoes for juice for the neighbors. We had pears, too. Richard Schinkel
There used to be a high demand for
There were advances in dealing with spraying materials that were isolated for specific problems, specific insects, specific weeds. There’s one that would kill all the weeds in [an] asparagus field, except for asparagus and sugarcane; so you didn’t have to worry about any of the weeds coming back. [Pesticides have] always been. We have movies of myself when I was three and four years old where they’re spraying the apples. It was more of a broad spectrum of spray. Some of it is still used today. The initial dormant spray is still in oil. That spray is still used today as it was fifty years ago. Most fruit and vegetable farmers today don’t indiscriminately use herbicides and pesticides because they can’t afford to.
One thing about being next to
The elevation here on this land in relation to the ground around it is very important in defending your fruit crops against spring frost. In a spring frost, the air is calm, and that makes the cold air settle into the valleys. The higher elevation has a distinct, warmer climate, moderated temperatures. That gives you natural protection against sudden spring frost. So the last ones to freeze are the ones on the highest elevation. We take the earliest blooming fruit, in our case, apricots are the first to bloom in April. So I plant them on the very highest elevation. The second is sweet cherries, so they’re right up there on the top, and then the peaches and nectarines are next in line, and the last are the pears, and plums, and apples. So we put them [o]n the more marginal side. We do not cultivate except when we replace an orchard, or occasionally if we have [a] need to work the soil. We do very little of that because this is very erodible land.
I often think of the quality of fruit. There’s a short window when it’s ripe and ready, and good flavor, and if you capture that fruit and enjoy it in that time, you will be much happier than if you buy something in February that was picked last August. You have everything but the flavor. I often think of it as a sunset. You can wait maybe all day, but there’s only that one moment, one fleeting moment, that the sunset can really be enjoyed. You can take pictures of it, you can do all kinds of things, but the real flavor of the sunset is that fleeting moment, and that’s it. You gotta remember that.
Apples, peaches, and cherries were our main crops, and then we got into apricots, nectarines, plums, pears, and all these varieties of apples. We’re very diversified in fruit production, and by being diversified, any one of those can be lost because of frost, hail, or something, and we’ll still have several other crops. We don’t normally lose all of them at once. When people come here to buy fruit from the farm, they’re looking for many varieties rather than just one variety. When it comes to the farm here, they like to see it all. We have a nice display in our market and we do taste testing. We encourage everyone to taste the fruit when they get here. And that’s all things that they cannot get from a supermarket very often. Herb Teichman
We are fortunate in
With the advent of pressurized sprayers, they were able to control the insects. The sprayers didn’t come about until around the turn of the century. The first ones were powered by turning wheels that powered the pump or gasoline engines. Later on, steam engines actually powered the sprayers, and finally power-driven from a tractor. This spraying controlled not only the insects but also the weeds. This solved the problem of whether or not the vineyards should be cultivated because they could spray with weed killer under the vines and didn’t have to worry about hoeing or disking. Tim Washburn
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