The tens of thousands he left on his trees last fall now hang shrivelled on the branches. Then there are the 15,000 bushels of juice apples he dumped on his fields with a backhoe two months ago. Together, they amount to a combined loss of about $60,000. But Giffen, like many beleaguered apple growers, had no choice.

Giffen's father planted the orchard in 1939. It was a mainstay of his, and then his son's, livelihood. But in recent years, an abundance of apples from the United States and a glut of cheap apple concentrate from China caused the bottom to fall out of the Ontario apple market.

Giffen remembers the days when he sold his apples directly to local supermarkets. But now the stores do all their purchasing at head office and, more often than not, head office chooses imported apples. That, combined with the poor price for juice apples, has forced Giffen to remortgage his farm.

"How long," he asks, "can we keep borrowing like this?" Soon it will be time to start pruning his trees for the next season. But Giffen's not sure he'll bother.

His son Michael, 36, a school vice-principal, and daughter Lori-Ann, 28, a new mother, have watched their father struggle over the years, and both have rejected the possibility of taking over his business.

"Why would anyone in their right minds," he asks, "want to be a farmer?" Bob Giffen is not alone, says Adrian Huisman, manager of the 320-member Ontario Apple Growers Association. "This is a crisis."

Apples, still the most important tree fruit crop in Canada, have been an integral part of Ontario agriculture since the 1800s. United Empire Loyalist John McIntosh discovered the now-iconic McIntosh apple in Dundas County in 1811. Giffen is among the growers who sustain Canada's ongoing love affair with the "Mac."

But it's a romance that's withering over time. In the past 10 years, numerous orchards across the province have been abandoned or pulled down and planted with other crops. About 6,900 hectares (17,000 acres) are still in production, down from about 9,200 (22,700) a decade ago.

Just over a year ago, Harold Ardiel, 63, and his brother Doug, frustrated by the Canadian government's lack of support for the apple industry, made the decision to cut down all their remaining apple trees. They now rent their 60 hectares (148 acres) to a farmer who grows cash crops.

"We decided enough was enough," says Ardiel. "At one time you could make a living out of growing apples, but that's gone. There's no future in it now."

Canadian apple farmers aren't looking for subsidies, but what they badly need is a campaign to persuade consumers to eat homegrown apples, Ardiel contends. "Something similar to what the state of Florida does to promote Florida-grown oranges."

Giffen normally sells 30,000 bushels to local processor Golden Town Apple Products as juice apples. Golden Town, based in Town of the Blue Mountains, processes about 85 per cent of Ontario's juice apples.

But a demand from retailers last fall for cheap product, and a bumper crop of more than 10 million bushels of apples in Ontario — 30 per cent higher than expected — resulted in a negotiated price with the growers of 5.3 cents per pound for the 4.4-million bushels of juice apples produced, says Golden Town manager Keith Cummings.

The flood of cheap apple concentrate from China and South American countries is a major factor in determining the price paid to growers for juice apples. Last year that price was about the same as it was 20 years ago, says Huisman, even though costs have soared.

Meanwhile, the unexpected glut of Ontario apples made it impossible for Golden Town to buy Giffen's 15,000 bushels of harvested juice apples in late October. The hardest thing for Giffen is that the apple orchard his father lovingly tended through the vagaries of time and weather could be snuffed out.

And it breaks his heart to go into local supermarkets where, he says, apples from the United States get prime billing. "It knots my stomach to see it," he says, "so it's best that I don't look."

But the biggest threat to Ontario's apple industry comes from China. According to the U.S. Apple Association, the annual Chinese crop is about 1.5 billion bushels — which already makes it the largest apple producer in the world — and is growing by 20 per cent a year.

The crop in the United States, meanwhile, is about 215 million bushels. Because of economies of scale, American growers can price their apples very competitively, says Huisman.

According to Statistics Canada, the value of apple juice concentrate imported to Canada from China in 2005 was just less than $24 million, up from $14.5 million in 2002 and zero in 2001.

Most Canadian consumers probably don't realize that little or no apple juice concentrate is produced in Canada, so any apple juice with "made from concentrate" on the label is almost certainly made from imported concentrate — even if it's packaged in Canada.

And the use of cheap apple concentrate from China is a wave that will only build, says Golden Town's Cummings. "I don't know how they manage to offer such low prices when they have to ship it halfway around the world," he says, "but unfortunately globalization is fact of life in the apple industry."

If approved, an Ontario Apple Growers proposal to the federal and provincial governments for a $50 million replanting program replacing varieties such as McIntosh with new types, like the increasingly popular U.S.-grown Honey Crisp, would go a long way to solving the problem, says Huisman.

Another solution is fostering apple-lovers' attachment to Ontario fruit.

"If consumers start asking where an apple was grown or where the juice came from and start demanding Ontario products," says Jackie Hendry, Grey County south regional director of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, "retailers will soon get the message."

Meanwhile Giffen, who sold all of his cattle after the devastating bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis in 2003, is thinking of expanding his chicken farming business.

"That's the only type of farming that's been profitable in recent years," he says, "but of course that could soon be under threat because of another Asian import — Avian flu."

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