The three older generations of Gluderers—everyone who could safely wield a tool—went into overdrive in preparation for the culmination of so many years of preparation. Plans turned into plantings and painting projects, until success seemed imminent. In June 2005 they threw open the doors of their new business, the Kräuterschlößl, or “Castle of Herbs.” Whimsically modeled after the architectural elements of the hundreds of castles and ruins in the region, their calendula-tinted castle outpost gradually rose above the adjacent orchards, creating a sharp contrast with the regimented greenery that covers the valley floor for miles in either direction.
Jutting up from the monotony of apple plantations, the eye-catching crenellations and bright gold facade of the business immediately garner the attention of anyone driving by. Little did the Gluderers suspect that their medieval motif would soon symbolize their strategic position as one last local bastion for an oncoming siege—and they were going to have to come up with the equivalent of a modern-day moat.
Building a family business requires more than a shared passion: It also takes a variety of talents and a division of labor that gratifies the individuals and propels everyone toward the common goal of success. Fortunately, the three adult generations of the Gluderers possessed a diverse suite of talents ideal for building a business from the ground up. “Everyone pitched in and did whatever they could,” Annemarie remembers. “Karl’s professional masonry skills were critical, and Manuel and Michael had construction experience, while Marion helped with building details. We only needed to hire in some help with plumbing and electrical work.” Having so much in-house construction talent proved critical: Within a year they were already embarking on further expansion of the “castle.”
They all continued to hone their production skills and expand areas under cultivation. In the fall of 2006 they uprooted all but one of the remaining apple trees on their parcel, with herbs and berries filling in the remaining available areas. “We left it there simply as reminder,” Annemarie notes. However, it would soon become a symbol of how they had flipped the local business model.
But it was business as usual outside of their bubble, and Big Apple was on an uphill roll, with no sign of slowing down. Urban understood his neighbors’ motives and inclinations, but his appreciation had its limits: “We’ve always valued fruit production in South Tirol, and all farmers should be able to farm in the way they want—but without disturbing others.”
There’s something about the history of farming. As soon as we start doing something well, we often start doing it so well that things turn out badly. The plow, the cow, and now the apple. Tool, animal, crop—when we capitalize too heavily on any one thing, we devalue other things that might be even more important to our communities than money.
Nonetheless, how apple came to be king in the South Tirol is a fascinating story rooted in the best intentions of the cooperative movement, plant breeding, agricultural technology, and regional marketing. From pip to power, the history of the modern apple is what one might call a Stark but Delicious rise toward Empire. In the South Tirol, it is a tale of unintended consequences. At least for the neighbors.
Although it’s difficult to pinpoint the precise arrival of what we commonly think of as the domesticated apple in the South Tirol, its first documented appearance probably goes back several thousand years. Archaeological and genetic evidence points to the presence of wild crab apples in Europe as far back as the Neolithic (11,500 years ago) and Bronze (4,500 years ago) Ages. But our modern apple has its native roots in Central Asia and is a relative newcomer to Europe. The apples of Central Asia were a key species of the famous “fruit forests” of the region, an area in which many of our contemporary fruits had their origins. Scientists and archaeologists believe that the apple might have arrived in Europe by way of the great trade routes that ran from China to the Danube as early as the Neolithic era.1
Through a combination of natural and artificial selection, the domesticated apple quickly evolved, particularly as humans learned the art of grafting, allowing them to replicate genetic clones of their favorite fruits. Some Mesopotamian cuneiform from nearly four millennia ago featured the grafting of grapevines, and the techniques represented were easily transferable to apples and many other fruits.2 As propagation techniques evolved, so did methods of efficient cultivation. Ancient methods of orcharding began to crop up, with Persians passing on their skills to the Greeks and Romans. It is likely that the Romans first introduced the domesticated form of the apple to the South Tirol, probably by way of their well-established westward thoroughfare through the Vinschgau Valley and their route northward through the Brenner Pass. The fertile soils and ideal climate of the Adige River basin created conditions well suited to the propagation of apples, grapes, and a host of other fruits, vegetables, and grains.
By the medieval era, the apple was relatively well established, with many farms in the region boasting one or more trees as a rare source of something sweet. Dried fruits became a staple of traditional breads, many of them reserved for holidays. Monasteries were often centers of propagation. Monks were reliant upon fruit propagation skills for growing the grapes that would become the wine so critical to serving the sacraments (not to mention other meals), and those transferable skills enabled them to control and care for apples over the course of generations within their cloistered walls. Their erudition also contributed to their breeding successes, and despite their vows of celibacy they found a way to pass on a genetic legacy.
Regardless of its challenges, apple production in the moderate climes of what is now referred to as the South Tirol offered market opportunities as far away as Austria and Russia, even in the 1500s. Peddlers moved apples from the southern flanks of the Alps to the less hospitable urban centers farther north, with most of the traffic moving through the renowned Brenner Pass, the most reliable of the north–south passages in that part of the Alps. The imperial courts of Vienna, Berlin, and even St. Petersburg were big fans of the South Tirolean apples, and they had the treasury to pay for them.3
Even in that era, the tyranny of the middleman dominated the commerce. Farmers not having the time or ability to travel to distant markets would often sell their perishable products to merchants at whatever price they could fetch, or, worse yet, they would sometimes sell to a peddler without setting a price. Price would then depend upon what condition the apples were in upon their arrival at their destination and, of course, the honesty of the broker who controlled the purse strings and was responsible for paying the farmer his earnings once the goods were sold. Needless to say, the farmer had little control of the individual sale, much less the marketplace.
In the early to mid-1800s, a call for fair markets and reasonable wages began to echo throughout Europe, spurred on by the inequities created through challenges such as industrialization, rural isolation, and concentration of wealth. There was a proliferation of cries for justice and possible solutions, but one experimental effort by twenty-eight weavers of scarce means would generate a response that would reverberate with miraculous resonance across decades and international borders.
Faced with atrocious labor conditions and meager pay, these twenty-eight brave weavers, about half of whom were from the town of Rochdale in Lancashire, England, decided to try to raise £1 each to contribute toward the purchase of goods that could fill a store. Calling themselves the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, they opened their leased storefront on December 21, 1844. They first offered a modest menu of basic goods, including butter, flour, sugar, oatmeal, and some candles, gradually adding tea and tobacco to their offerings. Those candles proved especially useful when the gas company refused to sell them gas to light their lamps. Despite deep distrust from other merchants and modest shop displays constructed of boards laid atop barrels, the Pioneers were successful in ways they had never imagined as they’d each scraped and saved to come up with that first £1. Within just ten years more than one thousand cooperatives
had sprung up across Britain. The Rochdale Pioneers had wisely created an easily replicable system by putting forward their agreed-upon principles, emphasizing the need for the individual members to take business into their own hands through self-help and self-responsibility.4
Industrialization wasn’t the primary impediment to equity everywhere in Europe, however. Rural poverty was a different beast, but the cooperative principles were versatile. Friedrich Raiffeisen was a mayor of three different towns in Germany who adapted the basic cooperative principles to help address the ills he saw in his rural region. He had witnessed the starvation wrought on rural areas by the severe snows and cold temperatures of 1846–47, and he wanted to provide safeguards against a repeat of that tragic scenario. He was also deeply disturbed by the plight of farmers who were suffering at the hands of ruthless lenders and business owners.5
Familiar with the cooperative principles that were cross-pollinating across Europe at the time, he felt that dependency had to be conquered before poverty could be alleviated. That thinking eventually led him to believe that the solution was to establish lending cooperatives, essentially rural credit unions, a tool to promote what he called the three-S formula: Selbsthilfe, Selbstverwaltung, and Selbstverantwortung. Self-help, self-governance, and self-responsibility became the foundational principles of many cooperative-based initiatives in German-speaking parts of Europe, and they played a key role in the growth of Big Apple in the South Tirol.
The cooperative concepts promoted by Raiffeisen and others began creeping southward into the deep valleys of the South Tirol while the first rail line through the Brenner Pass was completed in 1867, suddenly opening up new markets to the north.6 Raiffeisen’s rural credit banks, which remain a central cornerstone of the region’s banking industry to this day, began to proliferate, and in 1893 the first apple cooperative in the South Tirol was founded in the Adige Valley. Fruit cooperatives began to blossom in the area, only to be nipped in the bud by the economic and cultural devastation of the First and Second World Wars.
In 1945 leaders of the various fruit cooperatives decided to use a collective approach to overcome some of their individual marketing challenges. With the motto “Strength through Unity,” they formed the Verband der Südtiroler Obstgenossenschaften (VOG), the Association of South Tirolean Fruit Growers’ Cooperatives.7 Still in existence, the VOG wields significant economic and political power, and its offshoot, VOG Products, is the largest fruit processor in all of Europe. Together with the other newer federation of cooperatives located in the Vinschgau Valley, the Association of Val Venosta Fruit Growers’ Cooperatives (established in 1990), VOG helps the twenty-plus regional cooperatives to store, process, and market their products.8
Today the scale and intensity of apple production in the South Tirol is hard to fathom without looking down from the rocky peaks shooting skyward from the valley edges or using a time-lapse camera. The orchards in South Tirol, the largest contiguous region of apple production in Europe, produce 10 to 12 percent of the continent’s apples—to the tune of 600 million to 700 million euros ($653–761 million) per year.9 That’s one million tons of apples—all from a province about half the size of the state of Connecticut with an average family orchard size of 6 to 7.5 acres (2.5–3 ha).10
In the short period since World War II, apples have been core to the transformation of the South Tirol from one of the poorest regions in Italy to its wealthiest province. The Rochdale Pioneers and Friedrich Raiffeisen shared the belief that geographic proximity and identity mattered in the formation and success of cooperatives. As a land and a people caught between competing nationalistic fervor to the north and the south in the first half of the twentieth century, the South Tiroleans used the second half of the century to bond together and transform their Alpine survival instincts into a cohesive brand built on quality and origin. They were so effective, in fact, that the FAO sent in a team of researchers to study their phenomenal success and then published a report in 2014 titled Apple-Producing Family Farms in the South Tyrol: An Agricultural Innovation Case Study.11
Just as Champagne, Parmesan cheese, and other foods have an official association and label with a given region, eleven varieties of South Tirolean apples have the protection of the EU’s geographical origin program. This protected branding (PGI, protected geographical indication) has helped to put the shine on South Tirolean apples in the globalized marketplace. If there is any single clear sign of the region’s effectiveness in tempting consumers to pay the price for taking a bite of a perfect South Tirolean apple, it is probably that the fact that an apple grower can generally support a family on the income from about 10 acres (4 ha) of production.
While the success of cooperatives and their federations has been critical to the growth of the apple industry, none of it would have been possible without creating a top-quality product as efficiently as possible. How the South Tiroleans found a way to produce more than twice as many apples with less than half the labor in a span of fifty years is one of the most extraordinary feats in twentieth-century agriculture—and it created one of the most vexing legal issues of the twenty-first century, one into which the Gluderers and Günther Wallnöfer had run headlong and unwittingly.
Most agricultural leaps are a series of technological hops. So it was with the growth of the apple industry in the South Tirol. Apple production and sales began to expand with the draining of the swampy areas surrounding the Adige River in the late nineteenth century and the development of cooperatives’ centralized warehouses for sorting, packing, and distribution. Despite the excellent growing conditions for apples in the mountainous regions—the crispness of autumn apples and fall mornings seemingly blended—the threat of frost during the sensitive stages of fruit development in the spring is always challenging in a land prone to dramatic shifts in weather.
In 1949 B. Holler, a fruit grower in the South Tirol, read about using overhead sprinklers to protect blossoms and fruits by coating the trees with water, encasing the burgeoning fruits with a protective layer of ice. Although not effective in extreme freezes, frost irrigation can mean the difference between a successful year and a total crop failure when the temperatures are within a few degrees of freezing.
Holler ordered and installed overhead sprinklers for his fruit operation and successfully employed them in 1950.12 Within eight years South Tirolean farmers had installed overhead irrigation systems for watering and frost protection on nearly 10,000 acres (4,000 ha) in the region!13 It was one of first examples of how quickly apple and other fruit growers in the region could test and disseminate new production methods. One benefit of being caught in the middle of the nationalistic aims of the Italian fascists and the German Nazis was that the development of a tight regional cultural identity and mutual cooperation strategies were key survival mechanisms that could be transformed into farmers exchanging agricultural knowledge to the shared benefit of their beloved homeland.
Just as the South Tiroleans were finding ways to capitalize on their small size, they began to take a hard look at apple trees of a diminutive stature. No single development would more dramatically impact the region’s apple production—or land-use patterns—than the adoption of what sounds like nothing more than tenure-protecting academic jargon: the slender spindle trellis system.
The apple trees that dominated the European and American landscapes up until the latter decades of the twentieth century were tall and broad, stretching their boughs to heights that seemed to taunt anyone intent on stripping their limbs of fruit. South Tiroleans had developed a unique system for harvesting apples that might be 20 or 30 feet (6–9 m) up. With the traditional Loanen—an amazingly lightweight single-pole ladder with a flexible cleated foot for dealing with steep slopes and wooden steps mortised through the pole’s center ladder—harvesters would climb to the far reaches of a tree and carry their cache down in a Tschaggel, a cloth picking bag slung over their shoulders.14
While the locals had done
what they always did best—innovate and climb—such a system didn’t have the efficiency needed to compete in an increasingly globalized marketplace. Their response was to innovate once again—and have the apple trees do the climbing instead of the harvesters, with the help of a high-tensile trellis system that would within decades turn the region into a geometric mosaic of perfectly placed concrete posts punctuating the landscape, from valley floor to terraced hillsides. The South Tirol was about to become the equivalent of a leafy solar panel in which the perils of slope were offset by the power of captured sunlight. Photosynthesis had never seemed so profitable.
Some revolutions begin with Woodstock; others begin with rootstock. The South Tiroleans chose the latter. Once they discovered what the ever-innovative Dutch were doing with dwarf rootstock, they traded in their Loanen, their slender pole ladders, for a slender spindle trellis system.
Tired of getting advice from salespeople representing a host of agricultural products, a group of around fifty fruit growers had decided in 1957 to invest in yet another cooperative-style approach. They created their own independent research and extension service—formally known as the Beratungsring für Obst-und Weinbau but generally referred to by the locals as the Beratungsring. As part of their early work, the Beratungsring hosted a January conference in 1959 on developments in fruit tree cultivation, and one presenter introduced what was happening with dwarf apple production in the Netherlands. Within eight months a delegation from the South Tirol set off to visit apple producers in the Netherlands and returned with an idea that would transform the South Tirolean landscape more dramatically than any empire could ever replicate.15
The beauty of a bountiful, full-sized apple tree weeping with a cascade of fruit is magical, but harvesting those apples can be terrifying and sometimes crippling or even deadly. Plant those trees on a steep slope and the dangers magnify. It’s no wonder that the smaller trees and trellis systems appealed to Alpine fruit growers, to the extent that it is now just as difficult to find a full-sized apple tree in the South Tirol as it is to find a mountaintop view of any valleys void of trellised orchards.
A Precautionary Tale Page 6