After 60 years of growing apples, Art Soons thought he had seen it all. Until this year.
“I’ve never seen such a load of fruit,” said Soons, 84, co-owner of Soons Orchards in New Hampton, New Hampshire.
“Last year, Mother Nature gave us a half-crop, and this year she gave us a crop and a half.”
Steve Clarke at Prospect Hill Orchards in Milton, New York has never seen a larger crop either, although he is more than a decade younger than Soons and can only speak to the past 50 years.
The words “bumper crop” are on every farmer’s lips now that the harvest is over, and the recovery from the late freezes that cost Hudson Valley orchards upwards of 40 percent of their apples in 2016 is complete.
“It’s certainly an excellent crop – size, colour, flavor – and we suspect it’s a record crop, too,” said Dan Donahue, the region’s tree fruit specialist at Cornell Cooperative Extension.
“The growing conditions were about everything you could ask for - plenty of rain, not too much heat and very little hail.”
The official pronouncement won’t come until June, when the National Agricultural Statistics Service releases its final evaluation of the 2017 crop.
As of Aug. 1, however, the service forecast that New York’s crop would top 1.2 billion pounds, against 1.1 billion last year.
At the same time, it forecast overall U.S. production would drop to 10.4 billion pounds from 11.2 billion in 2016, an indication that Hudson Valley growers will find ready markets for their fruit here and abroad.
New York is the country’s No. 2 apple grower, after Washington. Ulster County is the state’s No. 2 grower and Orange County, No. 8.
“Pricing has been good, reasonable enough that I haven’t heard any complaints,” said Donahue.
Michael Boylan of Wright’s Orchard in Gardiner said his approach – and advice – is to “not panic, and take your time marketing your crop.”
“We’ve sold bigger crops, so hopefully we’ll sell this one,” said Boylan, adding “bumper” couldn’t be applied to the yield from all of his 20-plus varieties.
Soons has seven coolers packed floor-to-ceiling with tens of thousands of pounds of apples to sell through the spring at the farm’s retail store and bakery and use at its cidery.
The farm extended its u-pick season into early November, but gleaners from Cornell Cooperative Extension and the Hudson Valley Food Bank still found thousands of pounds of apples on the trees last week – and left some behind.
“We picked as much as we could, and we were lucky to find some additional storage at another grower’s,” said Jack Pennings of Pennings Orchard in Warwick. “It was the greatest crop.”
Source: recordonline.com
