apples for market is extraordinarily difficult because of fungus and pests. Harry’s educational background and research work has proven instrumental in Hoch Orchards’ success. In fact, Harry wrote the book (literally) on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) for Upper Midwest orchard keepers. Thanks to his laborious IPM practices, Hoch Orchard uses no chemicals on its fruit. And he and Jackie are helping like-minded orchardists to do the same.
Hoch grows some Honeycrisp and SweeTango, but the rest of his orchard is devoted to over fifty different varieties, a mix of older and newer apples that naturally resist pests, disease, and fungus. Take the Duchess apple, planted by early pioneer farmers, which makes a fabulous pie, or the Viking, an older summer variety, especially sweet-tart and mild. The new generation of apples bred by the University of Minnesota all flourish without fungicides and pesticides: Pristine, a tangy, incredibly crisp dessert apple with a texture so delicate that it’s graded and polished by hand; William’s Pride, a resilient apple with a spicy edge. Hoch Orchard is proving that the newest apples, bred to grow organically, are economically viable, environmentally responsible, and delicious.
The orchard benefits from the Mississippi’s convection breezes, which rise to warm the fruit on cold nights and cool them on hot summer days. In August, the cycle of temperatures, coupled with the natural ethylene released from so much fruit, helps them sweeten and turn red. Hoch’s nine thousand trees, on more than twenty-five acres of land, flourish without dangerous pesticides, fertilizers, or fungicides. Hoch ripens the apples naturally, without plant growth regulators or ripening agents. The apples are cleaned and packed on the farm, without application of wax, food-grade shellac, or any post-harvest pesticides. Eagles soar above the trees, carried on the big river’s winds. Hoch, thousands of miles away from the West Coast’s commercial orchards, has redefined this iconic fruit.
West Coast growers in Oregon and California manage up to one thousand trees per acre on as many as thirty thousand acres of land. This provides efficiencies in pruning, spraying, and harvesting, but it creates huge challenges as well. As with humans, diseases, pests, and fungus spread rapidly among close neighbors, especially when they are genetically identical. As a result, farmers rely on fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides that employ such toxins as AZM and Phosmet. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a public health advocacy group, recently named conventional, commercially grown apples as one of the most contaminated fruits grown in the US. To reduce the use of these toxins, plant geneticists created GMO Red Delicious apples using transgenic technologies to code in genetic resistance to diseases, fungus, and pests. The first field trials of GMO apples were conducted in 1992 in the US, Great Britain, and New Zealand. But there’s no proof that these trees are any better than those nature has provided, and the encoded resistance is beginning to break down so that even more chemicals must be applied to resist disease and blight.
Last year, the Next Big Thing growers produced more than half a billion SweeTango apples. Recently, the NBT joined with twelve fruit marketers from eleven countries and five continents in a global consortium called IFORED. Currently SweeTango apples are sold in all fifty states and in Canada, and perhaps soon they’ll be grown and sold throughout the world.
What do we forfeit when we rely on other regions to provide us with food we could grow ourselves? We gain reliability and consistent supply, of course, but we also lose the flavor of a diverse life, and its savor—the knowledge that this flavor is only a season long, or only found with some searching. By growing a diverse food system in the Heartland, organizations like Seed Savers Exchange and small, independent orchards like Hoch are ensuring that there is yet magic in the world to attract our children to the outdoors and the richness that can imbue their lives with the memories of a vibrant past.
The apples we find at the Land School are a product of its isolated history. The school is in a remote area half an hour from supermarkets and shopping malls. The neighboring farmers who remain here eke out a meager livelihood raising dairy cattle, goats, sheep, and CSA vegetables, as well as some hay, corn, and soy. This farm’s isolation has allowed my old tree to thrive through four generations of families who picked the fruit, made sauce and pies, and stored the apples, wrapped in newspaper, in baskets in the root cellar.
The school’s apples are unique to this farm, to its soil, rain, and sun. I’ve never eaten anything like them. Will our kids recall their flavor? It’s the taste of fall family work weekends with wheelbarrow races, basketball in the hayloft, flashlight tag; of the day our big sloppy black Lab was ambushed by the bossy rooster. It’s the hours our youngest son, Tim, spent on the creek’s shore building “troll” houses with sticks and leaves; it’s the scent of the campfire’s wood smoke as parents and kids talked late into the night after dinner; and it’s that sticky, apple-rich scent that filled the packing shed when we sorted apples into the CSA boxes for the weekly share.
The new varieties from the U of M, SweeTango, Zestar!, and their forerunner, Honeycrisp, were not created in nature and are not the happy accident of wind or bees. Yet they’ve become the industry standard, exploding with juices and a crackling crunch, bloated and thin-skinned. That first snap of sweetness quickly turns cloying because they are a one-note fruit—big, and often hard to finish. The Land School’s neighboring farmer Dale told me that even his pigs seem to have tired of them. “If I put Honeycrisp or SweeTango in their trough they’ll tip it over. They’ve just gotten used to more complex flavors,” he jokes. “They’re interested at first, but then, you know, I can tell that they’re looking for something else.”
That saying—“The apple never falls far from the tree”—is often used as a catchall for the inevitable strengths and weaknesses that the older generation passes on to the young. Among farmers, the wisdom being passed can only be seen as a positive. The work being done to preserve heirloom apples is making it possible for those eager to learn the old ways to carry them forward, melding modern technologies and ecological wisdom. Our nineteenth century’s apple diversity reflected different purposes and different needs, but reflected an appetite for differences. When I taste a good apple, I taste the biodiversity it represents. If we succumb to a world of the generic apple, we are in danger of our taste buds becoming generic as well. Cultivating ourselves is the first step toward diversifying our orchards.
Dan Bussey’s orchard grows apples in fascinating shapes, colors, and flavors that can delight and nurture us all. As such, the apple is a “democratic” fruit, as varied and interesting and diverse as our country itself. An affordable luxury, apples are within the means of every person. Their enjoyment requires nothing more than our attention to the variety of trees and the stories they tell. Simple and straightforward, this fruit has a special meaning among people who know what they are eating. In many ways, the apple may lead us to a greater understanding and appreciation of our food and our land, in the same way the original apple, in the Garden of Eden, provided another kind of wisdom that carried us forward.
After that first Thanksgiving in Minneapolis, the farmers’ market stalls were given over to Christmas trees, and I felt little of the holiday merriment. Afternoons were long and gray, my job hunting proved fruitless, and I was envious of my husband’s work and long hours. One night, after gazing through the kitchen window onto patches of crusty snow, I turned my attention to the table my brother had built and a wooden bread trencher filled with unopened mail. “Get the flour from the pantry, the yeast, and the salt,” I could hear my late grandmother’s voice intone beneath the sweeping tick of our kitchen clock. “Set out the measuring cups, tie back your hair, and for pity’s sake, wash those hands with the brown soap over the sink.”
As the cold laced
