by Paula Manalo
The Secret Life of Fruit
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BY JOSH MORGENTHAU
Fishkill Farms, the apple orchard started by his grandfather in 1913 in East Fishkill, New York, is where Josh Morgenthau grows apples, peaches, cherries, berries, and vegetables and raises some livestock. Josh studied art at Yale University, and in addition to producing good food for local customers, he enjoys painting — when he has the time.
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One of my favorite childhood memories is opening my eyes as the morning sun filtered into the small bedroom of my family’s weekend home, a dark brown trailer. It lay far away from our apartment in New York City, among the apple trees on our two-hundred-and-seventy-acre farm, a working pick-your-own orchard in the state’s Hudson Valley. Life there was different from in the city, where I went to school and my parents worked. Fall abounded with the musky smell of fruit-filled cold storage rooms and the shouts of customers invading our orchard to fill their bags. Early spring meant pruning time and the rough scrape of apple bark on my skin as I scrambled up the trees to prune the tops. Spring brought the hum of birds, insects, and bees returning to do their work amid an ocean of white apple blossoms.
My grandfather, who had bought the land, grew apples there before embarking on a life of public service. Since then, most of the family in each successive generation showed less and less interest in the land. My father was the only one of the three children to keep his part going, who wanted the farm to continue. His brother had sold his land for development and his sister had let her orchard get overgrown and become a pest-breeding ground for ours.
Although he continued to operate the farm, my father’s real career was elsewhere. When our elderly farm manager finally retired, my dad leased the orchard operation to other growers. Over the ten years that followed, it was neglected. The trees went unpruned and became disease ridden. The small leaks in the barn roof grew into holes. And over the years, as West Coast apples flooded the market, my dad was forced to sell parts of the farm to keep the business going. Most other farms in the area closed down altogether. Since the time when he was a kid in the 1930s, my father’s orchard had gone from one of a dozen to one of only two in the area.
It was in the context of such losses, and seeing pieces of the farm that were once special to me turned into tract housing, that I wound up, after a detour in the world of higher education, back at the farm. I had no real experience or qualifications other than a head full of ideas and excitement. As my friends moved on to pursue dreams in the Big Apple, I dreamed of growing apples. It seemed like a conjuring act that had been woven into my family history for almost a hundred years, a fundamental mystery to me.
My father and I decided we’d stop renting out the farm and attempt to run the orchard, the complex farm market, and the pick-your-own business ourselves. We hired a farm consultant, a store manager, and vegetable growers. Suddenly I had forty acres of fruit trees on my hands and an incredibly steep learning curve ahead. I added three new numbers to my speed dial — that of our retired farm manager, who was still willing to share his wisdom; that of a friendly apple grower, who at my begging, took me on as his protégé; and that of the Cornell Extension agent who specialized in fruit.
Balance did not come easy. We squeaked by, that first year: We managed to sell a good amount of our crop, despite a series of personnel mishaps and false starts. The old equipment we thought we could rely on spent more time in the shop than in the field. The farm seemed to be in chaos. But by the second season, we had a good team of employees and were heading in the right direction.
Then a fire destroyed our historic barn. It took with it all our storage space and the arsenal of equipment it held. The season that followed was one of the wettest in history. With a pick-your-own operation, rainy days can be even more devastating than crop failure. I realized then that no matter how beautiful your crop is, it isn’t worth anything if you can’t sell it.
By this point, I was putting everything I had into the farm. I spent almost every waking hour growing or marketing fruit. In some ways, it was liberating. There was a freedom in bondage; I had all my work cut out for me, nothing else to think about, no time even to question or consider my next move.
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Work, risk, and often multiple failures, I found out, are behind fruit’s effortless facade.
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Finally, by our third season, things were relatively chaos-free. Still, it was one of the driest in years. This was great for disease control and for our pick-your-own market, but it was bad for a farm with no substantial irrigation system. That year, we ran out of apples — a happy problem. It would have been happier, though, if our crop hadn’t been two thirds its normal size.
As I took on the responsibilities of the farm, I became inducted into the secret life of fruit. More and more, I marveled at it: Fruit is nature’s purest and most immediate enjoyment, requiring nothing more than a rinse or simple rub on your shirt to clean it. From the fruit-eater’s point of view, it’s effortless pleasure. It demands none of the slicing, chopping, soaking, or parboiling needed by vegetables. Even on a chemical level, its energy is more accessible, more mobile, with no complex starches to break down. But the immediacy and the sweetness are deceptive. Work, risk, and often multiple failures, I found out, are behind fruit’s effortless facade.
I wanted to grow the fruit organically. But beautiful organic fruit is not a gift from nature. If it succeeds at all, it’s as a drop of goodness squeezed from a very unforgiving rock: From the moment of petal fall, when the flower’s ovaries swell into clusters of tiny fruitlets, apples are as vulnerable and frail as lambs in a pack of wolves. This window of fragility lasts for at least a hundred and twenty days, during which an apple contends with a murderer’s row of insects and diseases.
I became acquainted with the despicable apple maggot fly, which with a prick implants its offspring, all gleefully tunneling their way through the fruit in spirals. Then there’s the perverse codling moth, which enters and chews the fruit from the butt end. Finally, the dreaded plum curculio, the Houdini of insects: It doesn’t disappear, but it lays eggs in your crop and causes the apples to drop and disappear. This is to not to mention fungal diseases, which are even more devastating to your crop. In bad years, apple scab, the major culprit, will defoliate an entire tree.
I wanted to grow fruit without spraying, but it wouldn’t be easy. Did I want to lose my whole crop? How great a benefit to humanity would it be if the farm went out of business? Even from an environmental point of view, running tractors, fertilizing with organic fertilizer, and putting untold other resources, human and otherwise, into growing an organic crop, only to lose it on principle . . . well, that just didn’t seem reasonable. I quickly understood the root of the disdain many older farmers have had for the organic movement. In growing fruit, reality can quickly crowd out ideals.
For me, though, growing apples was not so much an experience of losing ideals as it was of re-centering them. I set out to grow fruit as organically as possible, but I settled for low-spray integrated pest management (IPM), in which synthetics are used minimally but are not out of the picture. It took two seasons of spraying with conventional materials before the previously neglected trees were healthy enough to start a true organic regimen in one block of the orchard.
In our supermarket culture, fruit has become so visual, so linked to beauty and perfection, that people ignore the fundamental paradox of modern fruit production — high levels of chemicals are the cost of unscathed, “perfect-looking” fruit. In pursuit of this ideal, we’ve lost a sense of what good fruit might actually look like, cosmetic imperfections and all. I found that many heirloom varieties have some innate disease resistance, which made them a no-brainer for our orchard. Being interested in growing historic varieties and growing fruit organically, I planted thousands of them.
Orchards and fruit trees have a special potential to span great numbers of years and to link generations. It’s said that Americ
a’s longest-lived apple tree was planted in 1647 by Peter Stuyvesant in his Manhattan orchard and was still bearing fruit when a derailed train struck it in 1866. The fruit trees my grandfather planted were pulled out and replaced long ago. But the varieties I’m planting now, against the current of increased yield and aesthetic improvement, are some of the same varieties he once raised. He probably stopped growing them because they were no longer commercially viable — because of their funky flavor, low yield, strange shapes and colors, many of the same reasons they’re becoming popular again.
But for all the reverence I feel, I’m careful not to idealize the farming of long ago. Lead arsenate, a double whammy of human poisons, was the number one weapon in the commercial fruit grower’s arsenal from the 1890s through the mid-1900s. And prior to that, in the early 1800s, apples looked nothing like they do today. People had never seen anything resembling the apples of today. And getting today’s customers to accept apples that bear more physical resemblance to potatoes than to fruit turns out to be even more challenging than is growing them organically in the first place.
New disease-resistant varieties, the product of years of concentrated university research, hold out some of the best hope for growing marketable organic fruit in New York. So, go ahead, plant apples for your grandchildren — just choose a disease-resistant variety if you’re not into spraying every seven days. We live, after all, in another world, with different resources, new information, and changing popular tastes. We cannot simply “go back” to the farming of our grandparents. “Remember your roots,” my dad always told me. “Don’t forget where you came from.”
When I first started going to the greenmarkets, he remarked, “You know, Josh, it’s amazing. Our family comes from a great line of peddlers and now you’re selling your goods on the streets too. It’s really amazing that you’re continuing the tradition.” Taken aback, at first I thought he was pointing out an embarrassing form of social regression. It reminded me of a refrain I often got from people I met: “Is this what you thought you’d be doing after college?” And what university-educated farmer hasn’t gotten that question at some point? Usually, it comes with implicit sarcasm, pity, or both. But as I processed my father’s remark, I came to realize he meant exactly what he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
PURPOSE
This chapter is about why we farm.
Farming is hard work, good work, but not to be taken lightly. It takes motivation. If we weren’t motivated, we’d be doing something easier, more accessible, more acceptable to the rest of society. But here we are, farming — energetically farming, passionately farming. Why? We each have our reasons. It’s a process that starts with that first season spent out of doors, covered in bug bites, doing someone else’s chores.
Apprenticeship is the portal into farming and, for many, a time of profound self-realization. For one thing, it’s often a lot of time spent alone in a field, in a quiet barn in the morning, bent in strain against a heavy load you’re not quite up for. It’s challenging and it’s solitary, with plenty of contemplative space. That space can be difficult; the quiet can be lonely. But that’s part of the deal — figuring out who you are when you’re alone, what you like, when you giggle to yourself, how you keep your mind still while forcing your body to work harder than ever before, how to comfort yourself, how to train your thoughts along a constructive trajectory — snipping off the side shoots and moving forward. You use the time and the space and the silence to think things through, and to come to some big conclusions. Our education hasn’t always trained us for this — but in fact this is the critical self-reflection of being human. Transformation is a big word, but so is what happens on a farm over the course of a season in the inner world of a new farmer.
Ultimately, we come to our own conclusions about life, and about how we want to live it. What role in society feels right and good, which physical space we will inhabit, what it means to farm. For me, it’s about having a dependably sensual daily life. I’ve become a sucker for sights, smells, textures, and rhythms. The sheer materiality of it — greening up pastures, strong round eggs, shiny clean jars and the sounds of their lids, the firm little legs of piglets, the snapping succulent stems of spinach. The swing of it all. I got myself some nice old tin buckets with wooden handles just so I could swing the pig slop better.
It’s true — if we wanted to do something easy, we wouldn’t have chosen farming. And although that decision to farm might marginalize us geographically (far from the big-city lights) and economically (yoked to our partners, to our animal chores, to our land and the neighbors it comes with, tied to the seasons, the toil, the weeding, the irrigation), it is also freedom. And that freedom, to think for ourselves, quietly, out of doors: That is a freedom we cherish above all.
— Severine von Tscharner Fleming
Purple Flats
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BY NEYSA KING
Neysa King works on an incubator farm in Austin with her husband, Travis. You can read more about her, Travis, and Round Table Farm at her blog, Dissertation to Dirt (see page 251).
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Friday afternoon at four, I was on my way to pick up my husband, Travis, from Green Gate Farms. At six, we were supposed to be at the University of Texas for a reception. I had been invited as a Normandy Scholar alumna, a history program I had participated in during my junior year. That Friday I had come home from work, showered, and dressed before I left for the farm, as I knew it would be a quick turnaround from getting home at five to being at UT at six. Travis couldn’t exactly go in his work clothes.
I don’t make a habit of reliving my college days, but this particular program is important to me. The professors I studied under were more than just mentors; at the time, they were who I wanted to be. They taught me to write, and to think about history differently, and they had sparked my interest in human rights and genocide studies, which I pursued in graduate school in Boston. I wanted to show my support for a program that was pivotal in my academic life, and that could be equally valuable for other students. I also wanted to catch up with the professors for whom I felt so much affection. I hadn’t seen most of them since I graduated. Some of them knew I had gone off to a PhD program. None of them knew about my current foray into farming, and I couldn’t help but wonder how they would react to my career choice.
As I took the MLK exit from Route 183, memories from school were swirling around in my mind. I realized that it had been almost two years since I left school for farming, and I’m still figuring out how to cope with the looks I get from people who were once my peers. That didn’t sit well. Was I buying into all the stereotypes I was fighting against? I wasn’t sure how to get past it. What I didn’t know as I pulled up to Green Gate was that I was about to find out.
I got out of my car and walked over to our field to check on the carrots. Between the poor germination and the weeds, the picture wasn’t particularly promising. As I was thinking of all the weeding we’d have to do on Saturday, Travis appeared with Skip, Green Gate’s owner. They walked the rows together, discussing our crop. I had on some pretty purple flats and didn’t want to muddy them, so I stayed at the front. When they came back, Skip suggested we re-till and reseed a bed or two. He said the germination was too spotty to justify hand-weeding five beds. Plus, the rains we’d gotten that week would provide a much better seedbed than the dry earth we had been working with before. We should take advantage of a potentially rainy weekend by getting the seeds in now.
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A part of me was upset that I couldn’t just say, without equivocation, “I’m a farmer. I grow your food.”
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It was already approaching five o’ clock. To get the beds ready to reseed, we’d have to unhook all the drip tape, till with the tractor, then rehook the drip tape. We’d be late to the UT reception.
“Well, you’d better get used to it,” Skip teased. “The weather is going to dictate your schedule for the rest of your lives.”
I
began walking down the rows now, mud clinging to the bottom of the purple shoes I had bought in New York. Skip was right. The soil was beautiful. A new litter of carrots might come a few weeks late, but they’d be more uniform and healthier, and they’d take less time to weed. I didn’t want to miss seeing my professors, but I couldn’t leave my field. I kicked off my shoes and rolled up my jeans, and Travis and I began taking off the drip tape. Once Travis got the tractor, I became so excited when I saw dark, heavy soil fluffing up behind the tiller — so unlike the sand blowing around a few weeks ago — that I wanted to redo the tilling of three of the five beds of carrots. We’d keep the two beds with the best germination. We arrived home just at six o’clock. My feet were covered in dirt. I was happy.
We did make it to the reception, albeit late. I had thrown on a black jacket and skinny jeans, but I still had dirt under my fingernails and my hair was windblown. Just as expected, I met the new class of Normandy scholars, and began mingling with my old professors. But when I got the inevitable question “So what are you doing now?” I felt the need to tell them I had been in a PhD program, and that I had in fact received my master’s degree, before going into farming. I got different degrees of support and incredulity. A part of me was upset that I couldn’t just say, without equivocation, “I’m a farmer. I grow your food.”
At the same time, the night was freeing for me. I hadn’t realized it until that point, but I’d been idealizing my old professors. To see them again, eating hors d’oeuvres, discussing academic politics, and fussing over college kids that looked so young to me now, I remembered graduate school more vividly than ever. And I remembered that I had, with a clear mind, decided to leave. My professors, I could finally say, weren’t doing anything more or less valuable than I was. They were just doing their jobs. And back at Green Gate that afternoon, I, for maybe the first time without looking over my shoulder, had done mine.