Wynne Weinreb and Scott Beaton farm 5 acres in the Lake Chelan Valley of Central Washington State at a place they call Jerzy Boyz Farm. They have helped pioneer organic Tree Fruit farming in their area and have received notoriety both as representatives and advocates for the small American grower. They were featured by Seeds Of Change on the back cover of their 2003 Catalogue that was mailed to 60,000 homes in America.
 
 

WYNNE

Scott and I were both raised on the East Coast. I grew up in the heart of New York City, and Scott grew up surfing on the sandy beaches of New Jersey. We met in Boston where we both received our undergraduate degrees. I was working days as a research librarian, and nights as a goldsmith and jeweler. Scott was working as a sports coach for low-income inner city youth and introducing them to wilderness adventures. In 1979, we embarked on a yearlong motorcycle trip across the continent. When our motorcycle broke down near the town of Lake Chelan, Washington, we decided to settle down and raise a family. We built an environmentally low-impact fieldstone house on ten pristine acres in the foothills of the North Cascade Mountains, while living in a teepee and then in a Mongolian-style yurt. Half of the year, we worked in conventional and organic orchards in Washington with pome fruit, and half the year we worked in Florida with citrus fruit.

That was where we were in 1987 when we decided to start a not-for-profit organization that initiated central Washington’s first recycling center, an idea that spurred the town into running a municipal recycling center, which Scott runs, and which has been a model for other local initiatives across the country. In 1989 we started Jerzy Boyz Farm on a virgin strip of land six miles north of Lake Chelan on a breathtaking south-facing bluff overlooking the mighty Columbia River. Jerzy Boyz now grows seven main apple and pear crops, emphasizing organic soil amendments, organic pest control, meticulous pruning, and closely monitored harvesting practices in order to maximize flavor,texture, and color, producing what we think is some of the best fruit in the world.

Some people agree. In October 2002 House and Garden called Jerzy Boyz pears "the most flavorful pears from American soil." In December 2003 Jerzy Boyz Farm was profiled in the documentary film Broken Limbs

By Jaime Howell and Guy Evans, as a new model for the Washington state apple industry. And Jerzy Boyz Farm is featured in a forthcoming book on organic farming by Linda Egenes and Rick Donhauser called Green Angels .

I am going to talk first about how we got into organic farming, then Scott will talk a little about the orchard techniques that we think make our product special, and lastly, we will mention how we handle some of the market challenges facing the organic producer, and the small specialty farm in today’s global marketplace.

I first became interested in agriculture in the 1970’s when I changed my own eating habits to organic cheese, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains—in response to the ranching and animal husbandry practices that have led to today’s

problems with mad cow disease, salmonella in poultry products, and widespread human resistance to antibiotics. We began reading widely about organic farming and began growing our own gardens in 1980. Year round, we supply much of our own produce for ourselves and our two teenagers. In fact, when we began honing our practical skills by working in both temperate and semitropical fruit production, we became all too familiar with the relentless applications of insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides, as well as the petroleum-based fertilizer fumes that permeated our clothes, houses, and the air we breathed. Kids were being sprayed at the bus stops adjacent to fields.

We had worked in orchard agriculture for ten years, learning everything we could about pruning, grafting and harvesting, skills that you have to see and practice. While Scott continued to manage the recycling center, we decided to invest all our saving in acquiring the sheltered thirty-five acre plot of pristine land that began our organic orchard. We were later able to add an additional thirty acres. This virgin south bench on the bluffs over the Columbia River had ideal qualities for pome fruit farming. The site was also part of the area’s federally funded irrigation project designed to help promote and agricultural economy, without which it would be impossible to farm the bluffs. The nutrient-rich program for building our sandy soil gives such wonderful flavor to the flesh and skin of fruit in our region, this combined with the warm days and cool fall nights that are needed to produce the satisfying crunch that customers crave in pome fruit, We selected this secluded location because none of this land had ever been harmed by the conventional pesticide use that was so pervasive in the apple growing region of the Columbia River Valley.

In planting our acreage, we developed each small block as time and money allowed, so that we would not find ourselves overreaching in production before we had an adequate storage and distribution system. We now have 3000+ trees on five acres although we have had as many as 6000+trees in production on 10 acres. An important part of our planning involves marketing: being aware of culinary trends, trying to anticipate the next vogue in fruit, and trying to create a sustainable market of consumers. To this end, we emphasize diversity- we started with Gala, Braeburn, and Fuji apples and Red Clapp’s Pears chosen all on the basis of their great taste—but now, we have expanded to Honeycrisp Apples, du Comice and Taylor’s Gold Pears. We have three dozen heirlooms and new cultivars under evaluation. This has also helped us weather the inevitable yet always unexpected climatological obstacles. This year, for example, it looks like the Honeycrisp grafts, a strain developed in Minnesota, will be the sturdiest variety to weather the surprisingly brisk subzero weather we’ve been having. With all the tempting new cultivars and heirloom revivals, we always have to balance the practicalities of marketing our product against the pleasure and excitement of testing a new fruit in the field. Sometimes we will road test a variety by planting a few trees or a row to see how they do during several seasons. We reassess the variety over 3 to 5 years and decide whether to expand the planting or not. We continually renew our cover crops and try to regraft or replant our trees so as to have up to 20% in the orchard in renewal.

When we were first setting out we grew our own rootstock and grafted the cultivars ourselves. The interest in more exotic and unusual varieties has enlarged the available support system, so we now get already grafted and licensed trees, or if needed, we order dormant scions from other collectors. We have the help of agronomists and grafters who assist us in testing and evaluating different techniques for grafting, pruning and crop management on our particular site.

At this point let me hand the discussion over to Scott to talk a bit about our agricultural choices and challenges.
 
 

SCOTT

Organic farming has many satisfactions—growing and eating your own healthy fruit, testing new varieties, developing new composting techniques, and sharing a healthful product with the public. The Chelan Valley has been perfect for fruit growing in many ways. The micro climate of warm days and cold nights helps for the perfect, crisp apple. Because our site is eligible for federal irrigation support, water is not the problem it otherwise would be. But one of our biggest challenges was, and still is, trying to build up a sandy desert soil with no organic content.

At the outset, we built the foundation of our orchard by planting cover crops and composting alfalfa, cow manure, minerals and organic fertilizers. We have a tractor-loader with a bucket that moves materials as well as a rotovator which can help mixing materials. We compost all our fruit wastes, and we have used bio-dynamic preps. We grow our summer gardens in the remaining composting area.

We regard our compost pile as one of our most important assets. We try for five tons of compost per acre per year, although sometimes we fall short of our goal. Good old-fashioned application by shovel has made this a big job, but it is worth it.

Our cover crop involves replanting different mixes as the orchard grass tends to overtake our transient plantings. We choose a diversity of flowering cereals, herbs and leguminous plants for cover crops in order to attract the widest variety of beneficial insect life. To control rodents, our region is rich in natural predators—by that I mean rattlesnakes. When we created our own label, we took the rattlesnake as our emblem. The snake is very realistic, and we have had plenty of opportunity to observe them around our wild terrain.

We also apply minerals and organic fertilizers to the orchard floor on a regular basis. Based upon the results of our yearly soil samples, we decide which nutrients to apply. We spray or foliar feed as well as fertigate. We are also experimenting with using compost teas to promote plant growth and enhance immunity.

Some pests are more tenacious than others. Thrips, birds, wild ants, mildew, and gophers cause problems, but the codling moth has been our worst pest by far. We have used pheromone mating disruption ties since we began farming, but since we have a site with lots of air flow the use of pheromones alone has not been sufficient. Good orchard hygiene is imperative. We have to thin fruit well, and we have to keep trees small enough so that our organic sprays and foliar feeds work effectively.

Growing new varieties is challenging as we explore their susceptibility to heat damage, bitterpit, low production, and alternate bearing. For efficiency, we have recently turned to the new method of spray thinning instead of the predictable, but expensive, hand-thin methods that we used for many years. Our spray schedule is rigorous; we try to pay careful attention to what is going on in the field to keep ahead of potential pests and problems. One thing we consider in evaluating commercial production of a new variety is the cost of maintaining it on our site. For example, some newer varieties require more spraying, and we have had to apply up to eight calcium sprays in some blocks.

Weather is the most constant challenge for us. By careful tree shaping, we try to keep our fruit out in the open sunlight for great color and to promote flavor maturity. This requires three prunings per year. To offset the gamble of sunburn in a hot season, where temperatures can exceed 105 degrees, we spray for sunburn protection.

No damage from pests comes anywhere close to the damage we have suffered from weather extremes. The crop has been damaged by hail storms, early harvest freezes (down to seven degrees last harvest) and raging windstorms sometimes over 60 miles per hour. On July 9, 1994, our eleventh wedding anniversary, a cold blast of mountain air hit our desert air and 1 ½ inch hard spiky hail destroyed our crop and just about ripped our trees to shreds. We were forced to drop half of the crop to the ground, and then wynne hand-packed the remainder to sell at Seattle farmers’ markets.

That precarious season convinced us we could be better prepared to weather a low harvest due to adverse weather if we saved costs by packing our own crop. The next year we marketed our own crop. We packed and stored it at a shed 25 miles away. It was 1995 and demand for our organic varieties was very high. We sold mostly to Seattle supermarkets and one large national distributor. By 1996, it became apparent that if we cold pack and store our fruit on site we could streamline production and save both time and money.

Typically, agribusinesses use computerized equipment costing millions of dollars to run millions of pounds of fruit. We invested in a small packing shed and cold storage. We had a metal pole building built on a slab we poured, and bought a salvaged compressor and evaporators. Meanwhile, Wynne was visiting obsolete packing sheds that had long ago run their last apples, in pursuit of equipment we could put to adaptive reuse. Finally she discovered the neglected queen of the packing lines, a 1936 Cutler Grader---a sweet, virtually indestructible packing line/sizer,grader used for decades until the 1970’s when many sheds consolidated. We were able to salvage two complete grader systems for around $500. For many, these discarded machines were a thing of the past—but for us a 1935 breakthrough in the apple industry was a wonderful piece of equipment perfectly suited for a specialty orchard in 1996.

Setting up the packing, sorting, and storage facilities had allowed us to optimize quality control. As the sorter, Wynne is able to inspect every single piece of fruit that comes in from our field. This means we can make sure fruit is not being bruised, or picked too early or late. The end result is that we can grade the fruit that goes into the boxes to our high standards. Wynne has developed a marketing plan that enables us to get information about our product to the public and to reach them through a variety of venues—some mailed directly to customers, some sold through gourmet catalogues, and some sold on site, as we did for a Japanese tour group recently. I honestly have learned that "apples can be great."

Wynne

Today organic produce is in ordinary supermarkets as well as in specialty stores. Large conventional growers are moving huge parcels into organics. In addition, larger distributors have partnered with southern hemisphere organic growers to extend their supply season and profits.

Yet is some sense this is a mixed blessing. The goal of widespread acceptance of organic produce has occurred, but the problem of agribusiness edging out pioneer producers, and the risk of reduced vigilance in organic standards by reliance on imported non-American fruit undeniably poses local and global challenges. We feel really good knowing that our mission to spread the merits of organic produce and organic farming had borne fruit in more ways than one. But competition from megabusiness and the southern hemisphere applies pressure to the American producer by lowering market prices and shortening the selling season.

The impact has been widespread. Cascadian Farms uses local produce for roadside stands, but has to rely on southern hemisphere suppliers for its frozen food line. The New York Times ran an article last week on the potential for franchising organic restaurants using local produce. Are these practices compatible? Can the local supplier survive in a world of international agribusiness?

The real question is always how to retain vitality in a business. We diversified our product line and offered packing services. But in the realm of small-scale organic farming, you have to be prepared to do the work by yourself at any hour. You are cabin boy and captain. We now hire out 30% of total farm working hours at $10 per hour. We have two great guys who help us work the field year round; our teenage kids help out—occasionally; and two packers help us in the shed during packing season. Our employees would work as many hours as we could provide, but their hours are regulated by the size of the crop. The weather determines when work gets done, often at a breakneck pace. Last year, we finished Fuji harvest with a 7 degree night that damaged our fruit buds and reduced our crop, so this year Scott and I were able to do 85% of the field work ourselves. One way we decrease our vulnerability to climate and market conditions is that we do not rely on bank loans to operate. We take a lower salary in a low production year.

We feel we could always reduce the number of trees to avoid taking on debt. We are fortunate that one of us has a regular off-farm income…

Just as we continually renew our plantings, our business survives through change and flexibility. In addition we move to diversifying varieties, testing more heirlooms and soft fruit, entering the exotic tomato and cucumber area (our favorites), and reaching for more direct markets. The pressure grows as bigger farms begin to market using the model we have established. Farmers markets have created a new awareness of fresh food across America, but farms our size find themselves leaving the farm and driving long days to compete for the new prosperity. It is difficult to justify that much time away from the farm.

Whatever our market choices, we believe that by working in cooperation with the land, with our neighbors, and ultimately with our consumers, our goal remains clear:

Lets help keep Americans farming and help keep Americans eating clean healthy food.