Late August brings school openings, cooler nights, shorter days, and yes, summer’s end, but it also brings the ripening of Connecticut’s earliest variety of locally grown apples — Paula Reds.
By Labor Day weekend, pick-your-own apples will be in full swing across Connecticut’s 87 commercial orchards. Without a single spring frost or particularly hot spell after the harsh winter, farmers are looking forward to a robust crop, barring a severe hurricane or drought, with more than 20 varieties available at most orchards.
For five generations the Bishop family has grown apples on Connecticut’s coastline, providing that essential pick-your-own New England tradition for thousands over the years. Their Guilford farm — at the start — was far from alone. On a drive around the farm with current farm manager Jonathan Bishop, he points out remnants of old dairy farms and the fields of another farm family — the Fonicello’s — that are now populated with office buildings.
“We are sort of like the last farm standing here,” Bishop said.
As of 2012 there were 436,539 acres of farmland in Connecticut, a decrease of nearly 8,000 acres since 1982, according to the 2012 census of agriculture.
A career in agriculture just isn’t appealing to younger generations. Even agricultural colleges — like Delaware Valley where Bishop attended and the University of Connecticut — have shifted their focus over the years to more of the business and environmental sides of farming.
“Do you want to pick fruit all day?” asked Rick Macsuga, a marketing and inspection representative with the Connecticut Department of Agriculture in response to a question about a labor shift at Connecticut’s orchards in recent years. “People don’t want to pick fruit for a living, it’s the way of the world today. If a high schooler showed up asking for a job, chances are they would get it.”
But they just aren’t asking.
Since the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed in the 1990s, more and more Hispanic laborers have been coming to work on New England’s farms, said Brian Kelliher owner of Enfield’s Easy Pickin’s Orchards and chairman of the Connecticut Apple Marketing Board.
“Last year for the first time I had not gotten enough returning workers or local workers answering our ads, so I got Jamaican labor through the H-2A program (a temporary agricultural worker program),” Bishop said. “There was a time when a lot of our farm workforce was made of high school kids that picked berries or thinned peaches, parents wanted their kids to learn a good work ethic, but now we have a bunch that work in the store but few if any ever apply to do farm work.”
Eat Local Trend
The farmers market is attracting far more customers than when Bishop was growing up, a trend many say can be attributed to the eat-local movement.
“Businesses always have to reinvent themselves,” Kelliher said. “Farmers markets have expanded a great deal since [the 1980s when PYO was at its peak] and more recently the CSA market has opened and expanded.”
The expansion into CSA (Connecticut Supported Agriculture) farms across the state has caused many to diversify their farms — adding vegetables in addition to fruit trees and bushes.
“Vegetables are definitely increasing on farms across the state; there are just a few farms left that only have apples,” said Kelliher, who has just 6 acres of apples on his diversified farm, which supports strawberries, raspberries and vegetables as well as a patch designated to pest control experimentation by a UConn researcher. “The CSA program is a new phenomenon that I’m hoping will keep going.”
Kelliher and Bishop explained that running a CSA program is a different kind of pressure from pick-your-own. Instead of worrying about rainy weekends, the focus is more on planning and management in order to provide fresh food every week.
“A lot of times it was hard to grow things just for our own store. With the farm you get nothing or too much, not the few cases needed for a store,” Bishop said. “But with the CSA when you’re ready, boom they go in their basket. It’s been very successful.”
This year Bishop’s Orchards is expanding even further to include a fall CSA in addition to its 20-week June to October shares. The new program will continue each week from the end of October through December. Shares will include winter squash, apples, Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes and -ps are in progress.
But for those still interested in hitting the hillside for another season of pick-your-own, find the farm that suits your needs best — fruit variety, location, price — at the Connecticut Apple Marketing Board’s new website (and app): http://www.ctapples.org/.
