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Winter 2005

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A Fruitful Partnership

A New Kind of Farm a New Breed of Farmer

Dear One Absent This Long While

Feature

A Fruitful Partnership

–Christopher O'Carroll




	Kristen Hanley ’98 (Stockbridge) fertilizes apple trees at Cold Spring Orchard in Belchertown. (photos by Ben Barnhart)

AT COLD SPRING ORCHARD IN Belchertown, Farmer Joe grows more than 150 varieties of apples. Buyers flock to his roadside stand for exotic varieties you can’t find at most supermarkets: Hudson Golden Gem, Roxbury Russet, Winter Banana, and other delicacies. Apples are the stars of the show, but the farm also offers homegrown plums, pears, and peaches so juicy Farmer Joe advises eating them with a lobster bib.
Every year during harvest time, mid-August through late October, he sells about $100,000 worth of fresh fruit. That’s less money than it costs to run the farm for a year, less than it would take to keep a commercial grower in business. But Cold Spring Orchard is not an ordinary commercial operation.

“Farmer Joe,” as he’s known to the vanloads of school children that visit his apple trees each year, is Joe Sincuk ’70, ’72. His official title is farm superintendent, which he finds “a little too highfalutin’” and doesn’t use much. The orchard he manages is the Horticultural Research Center (the “Hort Center” to fruit-industry insiders), a sophisticated scientific facility where UMass Amherst faculty and staff experiment today with techniques that growers all over New England will use tomorrow.

Researchers at Cold Spring test hardy new strains of rootstock and tasty new varieties of fruit. They’re studying dwarf cultivation methods that could pack more than 2,000 trees into an acre. They’re experimenting with hormones that affect the number of apples on a tree. They’re developing strategies to control pests with the lightest application of chemical sprays. “These are the kinds of studies that can really propel the industry into the future,” Sincuk says.

When he came to UMass Amherst in the late 1960s, he was a kid from the Boston suburbs with Woodstock-era visions of back-to-the-land living. “I loved the country,” he remembers. “I wanted to live in a more rural area.” He earned a Stockbridge degree, added a bachelor’s from UMass Amherst, and went to work at the Belchertown orchard. At first, he didn’t quite fit in with the other farmhands, Sincuk recalls. “They called me a hippie, I called them rednecks. But in the end, people respect hard work.” He rolled up his sleeves for every dirty job on the farm, and after a couple of decades of hard work had won enough respect that the university asked him to run the place.

The $100,000 Sincuk and his crew reap nowadays from the Cold Spring retail operation is a big improvement over the $2,000 a year the orchard used to make selling fruit by the bushel to UMass Amherst dining halls. Still, proceeds from the roadside stand cover only a portion of operating costs. The farm relies on the university and on the private Horticultural Research Fund, which holds the land in trust and draws on a modest endowment to help support the site’s scientific explorations.

The Massachusetts Fruit Growers Association (MFGA) created the Horticultural Research Fund in the 1960s, when the university was going through a somewhat untidy growth spurt and farming sites on the former Mass Aggie campus were in danger of disappearing under new construction; the dorm complex out beyond the Health Center wasn’t arbitrarily named Orchard Hill. To sustain fruit tree research at the state university, the MFGA splurged $40,000 on 215 acres of Belchertown farmland and a trust to oversee it. Forty years later, growers are pleased with the investment.

“They’re really at the cutting edge,” says Bob Davis ’59, a veteran apple man who operates a family farm and fresh produce business in Bolton. His friend and fellow Hort Center trustee Frank Carlson ’63, whose orchard in Harvard is one of the region’s largest fresh-cider producers, calls Cold Spring “the leading facility in New England.” The Massachusetts fruit industry is coping with a period of dramatic change, Davis and Carlson agree, and research at the Hort Center is crucial to its survival.

The apple industry has deep roots in this part of the world. The Roxbury Russet, the first new variety of apple named and cultivated on these shores, grew in colonial Massachusetts sometime before 1640. John Chapman, who became famous as Johnny Appleseed, was born in Leominster in 1774. Today, the state has about 5,000 acres of orchard in production, and grows somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5 million bushels of apples per year. That’s nowhere near the output of such industry powerhouse states as Michigan, New York, and Washington, but it adds up to a lot of crunchy eating, juicy drinking, and fragrant baking. As long as the apple orchard holds its distinctive place in New England’s landscape, growers will look to the research at Cold Spring Orchard to help them prosper in a changing marketplace.

Joe Sincuk recalls one of the first research projects he worked on in the 1970s, an effort to grow apples that were richer in calcium, which had been found to act as a natural preservative. Scientists and farm workers added calcium to the soil in various concentrations to test its absorption by the roots. They festooned the orchard with hospital-style IV bottles and stabbed through the bark to drip the dissolved mineral directly into the wood. They sprayed the apples on the tree with liquid calcium mixtures. They dunked the fruit in calcium baths after picking. Sometimes things went wrong. Too much calcium in the soil might change the acidity and interfere with other nutrients. A concentration that worked effectively when applied directly to the apples after harvesting might damage foliage when sprayed on the trees. But every success and every failure produced a bumper crop of useful data. Young Farmer Joe found adventure in that kind of experimental agriculture. “It was a really good way to see applied research in action,” he says. “It helped a lot of growers.”

You don’t have to look far to find more of the same at the Hort Center today. Multicolored plastic ribbons flutter from trees in many parts of the orchard, an op-art code of stripes and polka dots that helps researchers track pesticide and fertilizer dosages and other experimental data. On one small demonstration plot, less than half an acre, trellises of post and wire support more than 700 dwarf trees, their trunks not much thicker than broomsticks, their scrawny limbs tied strategically to the wires and bearing a crop of full-size fruit. This, says Extension educator Jon Clements, is the orchard of the future—trees planted just two or three feet apart, clinging almost like vines to support structures that carry the weight of the apples.

Clements, who describes his Extension service position as “a liaison between university research and the growers,” hopes New England apple farmers will be impressed by the performance of the Hort Center’s dwarf trees. “If you go to Europe,” he says, “if you go to the more progressive areas where they’re really growing the majority of the fruit, all of the apples are being grown on dwarf rootstock.” Dwarf trees begin bearing fruit at an earlier age than standard size trees, Clements says. Their apples are easier to gather at harvest time, and because there’s no dense canopy of leaves overshadowing part of the crop, more apples get sunlight, which enhances
color and flavor development.

Of course, things can go wrong in a dwarf orchard. Diseases and infestations might spread out of control with the trees so closely packed. Farms that rely on pick-your-own business might find that customers prefer more traditional-looking trees. So Cold Spring, which is free to take risks that commercial orchards can’t afford, will be producing fresh apples and fresh data from these few hundred trees for the next several years. Growers around New England will be able to follow the progress of the dwarf tress and arrive at their own conclusions about whether to adopt this new growing technique.

A dwarf tree, like any commercial apple tree, is a two-part creation—a variety of fruit grafted onto a variety of root. Horticulturist Wesley Autio ’82G, ’85G, a professor in the Department of Plant, Soil, and Insect Sciences, explains that if you plant a seed from a Macintosh apple, you’ll grow an apple tree, but you won’t grow a Mac tree. The tree that produced your apple had to be pollinated from another tree of a different variety, so the seeds inside that apple carry genetic heritage from two parents. The way to reproduce Macintosh or Red Delicious or any other favorite apple is to graft the chosen variety onto an established root system. “There are two different varieties in every tree,” Autio says. “There’s a root variety and there’s what we call a scion variety, which is the fruit variety.” The genes of the rootstock control tree size, while the genes of the scion stock control what type and size of fruit the tree produces. In this way, apple biology allow growers to use dwarf rootstock to propagate popular varieties that originated on standard size trees.

Nobody can predict with certainty whether dwarf trees will dominate the New England orchards of tomorrow. Growers know for sure, however, that their business is not standing still. “Our fruit-growing industry in New England is undergoing radical changes,” says Frank Carlson. He and Bob Davis have been planting new crops to supplement their apples, and both expect that trend to continue, which means that they anticipate relying on the Hort Center for a wide range of fruit and vegetable research.

“There’s hardly any such thing as just growing apples and peaches anymore,” Carlson says. “I think we’re going to depend on that facility more in the future. As we diversify, we’re going to be more dependent on some of their knowledge and some of their data.” Davis nods vigorous agreement, adding, “This is a facility to keep agriculture moving in New England.”

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A Fruitful Partnership

A Fruitful Partnership: more images

Ron Prokopy, 1935-2004

Ron Prokopy, 1935-2004: larger image