Mark Longstroth

• In [19]69, the first planting of dwarf, truly dwarf fruit trees, was made here in Van Buren , Michigan .  Those trees only get to be about six to eight feet tall.  Full-size trees might be planted thirty by thirty feet with maybe seventy trees in between, and eventually get to full bearing when they’re twenty years old.  [You] might have three or four hundred bushels to the acre because you’ve got all this space between the trees that you have to fill. 

• About two-thirds of Michigan fruit is sold for processing.  We have a large processing industry that’s here in Michigan because the fruit industry’s here, and the fruit industry’s here because the processing industry is here.

• Berrien County is one of the few places in the state where you’ll still see the farm run its own packing house; where they pick the fruit, put it in boxes, and ship it. 

• Here in Southwest Michigan , we grow cherries and we expect to have a total loss one year out of four, a full crop one year in four, and the other two years we have a half a crop cause of spring frosts.  If you can be on a high piece of ground, it’s more frost free than lower pieces of ground.  The way the hill slopes is important.  If you have a high piece of ground that’s flat on top, the edges of that high piece of ground will be more frost free than the middle of it.  The middle of it will get a dome of cold air on it that’s running off the edge, so it’d be thinner on the edges.

•   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 Europe , but they get phased out as the market dies.  People weren’t making many gooseberry pies anymore, so the market for gooseberries died.  A conscious decision was made to destroy the currant industry. 

• We see more and more u-pick farms or farm markets, roadside markets, and those people like a real mix of stuff.  You want asparagus so that somebody can come by in the springtime and you can sell them asparagus, and then strawberries.  You want a different piece of produce coming in all summer long so that once they start coming, there’s always another reason for them to come back.

• The small fruit grower is disappearing.  The small farm is disappearing, because the profit margin is so low.  So you see smart people getting out of the business.  In general, you probably need eight hundred acres in order to generate enough income for you to live in a style that most people would like to live in.  What’s happened in agriculture is that the profit margin has shrunk because the amount of money they receive has stayed the same since the [19]60s and [19]70s, but their costs have all doubled.  They just can’t produce enough profit to maintain themselves.  We[‘ve] had an awful lot of apple orchards in Michigan that people just walked away from and sold them.

• There’ll be a great shake-out in the fruit industry, [in] my opinion, where we’ll see the disappearance of the small grower [who] grows for the wholesale trade.  You’ll see large growers, large corporate farms, or large family farms that grow for the wholesale trade.  The small growers will have to focus on roadside markets, what we call “agritainment,” where the person has something for the whole family to do and keep them on the farm whether it be a haunted house, a corn maze, or pick-your-own apples or blueberries.  Something to get that person to come back time after time, and spend money on the farm and stay on the farm.

  The average age of my growers is probably between fifty and sixty.  As they get to [be] seventy or eighty, they die, and someone sells that farm.  In southern Berrien County we have real pressure from Chicago . 

• Instead of one person picking for a day to pick all the cherries off a tree, you have four people do it in one minute and go to the next tree.  Suddenly cherries went from a crop that was very hard to grow and very expensive, to a crop that was very easy to grow and very cheap. 

HOME / ONLINE EXHIBIT / TEACHER RESOURCES / LINKS / SITE INDEX

WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY / FT. MIAMI HERITAGE SOCIETY OF MICHIGAN