James Lull

Beginning in 1848, James Lull has worked seventy-eight years on the same family farm in Watervliet, Michigan.

A lot of our sweet cherries in Michigan several years ago were put in so-called barrels of brine and made into maraschino cherries. Now, they all come from Italy. I’ve seen the barrels and that market is gone completely. Now there are a few small outfits that put up cherries, but basically they are all gone.

The Blossom Festival is a promoter for the industry. It was a great idea when it started. It has changed completely. Back in the [19]40s, [19]50s, maybe early [19]60s, they might have had the University of Michigan band, the Michigan State band, Western, Northwestern, and Notre Dame. But now it is all downscaled and mostly local.

We obtained another forty acres in about 1908, when my father came over from Germany in 1890 and moved to this area. Previous to that, he married my mother. Then they started growing fruit prior to 1898. A couple of years ago, we had one row of apples that were pushed out, which my mother told me were planted in 1898.

The cost now to plant an orchard I wouldn’t even guess, because the apple trees, they plant them like we used to plant tomatoes. They plant them that close together, these dwarfs. Theory is it’s easier to get them picked, you don’t need ladders or things like that, but some of these will cost five-six thousand dollars in order to plant an acre of apples. You would have to ride out the bad years and hope for good ones. My father used to say that, “If I have three out of four good years, it’s fine.” If I have two out of four [years], we’re doing fairly well. If it was one out of four [years], we were in trouble and couldn’t make it. I think that kind of holds true now, depending [up]on the commodities that are grown.

Technology tremendously has entered into the processing in the last twenty or thirty years. They have these dwarf trees and some of them won’t get any taller then you are. They plant these, five-six-seven hundred to the acre with a conduit to hold them up. The cost is just phenomenal. If you do not have irrigation, then you better not be in the business because if you do not get enough rain, you won’t get any yield. You could also get the rain at the wrong time. If the blossoms haven’t pollinated, they will fall off and you could get a beating rain.

The migrant help that we had living with us was like growing up with strangers. One time when I was a youngster, we had three men that lived at our house for three months. From 1929 until probably 1940, there was anywhere from one to three migrants [who] worked year round and lived in the house. I recall the so-called hobos.

During the Depression, it was a dollar a day or ten cents an hour, and pickers were paid by a container filled with a certain commodity. Juice apples, at one time, were twenty-five cents a hundred pounds, tart cherries were two and a half cents a pound. Proportionally, prices began to increase along with labor costs. Farm labor has never been overpaid because it’s tedious work.

They’re necessary [chemicals]. They’re not as dangerous as they’re portrayed to be if they’re handled properly. I have handled chemicals since I was twelve. I’ve gone the gambit from lime and sulfur, summer oil, nicotine sulfate - which was either black leaf forty or black leaf one-fifty-five arsenate lead, DDT, DD, DDE, parathion.