# Life On The Fruit Farm



## Orchard6

Since there was a lot of interest on another topic I decided to start my own.
We have nearly 400 acres of apples. We have our own packaging facility where we package and sell fruit wholesale to stores like Meijer, Kroger, Wal-Mart, Save A Lot and Aldi's. 
Here are some pics of our operation.

This is the "wet end" of our grader. The apples are in those wooden bins on the left. The bins are submerged under the water and the apples float out and around to the elevator. There is a large circulating pump that keeps the apples moving to the elevator.


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## deadmoose

Quite the operation.


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## Orchard6

Off to the left is the first inspection area. This is where any cull apples are manually sorted out. The culls get sent back to the wet end and placed in a wood bin to be sold as juice or sauce apples depending on their size.


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## Teslan

I'm curious. How much do the stores increase the price compared to what they pay you. Here in Colorado they increase the price of potatoes and onions quite a bit. Also do you have to hire labor to pick the apples or do you have a mechanical way of picking them?


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## Orchard6

After inspection they go down our 2 lane grader. Our grader has 2 cameras watching each lane and can sort by color, diameter and weight. There are numerous places we can put each apple depending on what is needed to fill an order or multiple orders at the same time.

These are mesh baggers, they are fully automated and can make any size bag we need.


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## Orchard6

Whoops! This is a mesh bagger!

This is a new bag of apples headed down the line to be boxed up.


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## RockyHill

We've been getting some apples at Wally World that look like the ones in post #5. Really, really good apples!

Shelia


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## Orchard6

This is what the final packaging looks like before we send it out to a grocer near you!

All stacked and ready to load!


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## Orchard6

This is one of 7 cooler/controlled atmosphere rooms. We can pull almost all the oxygen out of these rooms to preserve the apples for a much longer shelf life than just cooling alone. Each of these rooms hold 20,000 bushels of apples.


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## Orchard6

Teslan said:


> I'm curious. How much do the stores increase the price compared to what they pay you. Here in Colorado they increase the price of potatoes and onions quite a bit. Also do you have to hire labor to pick the apples or do you have a mechanical way of picking them?


Stores usually double the price they pay us for the product. On average we get between $14 and $17 per case (40lbs) of apples depending on variety.
Apples are still picked with manual labor. We have a crew of 40-50 migrant workers that harvest our crop.


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## Orchard6

This is the type of sprayer we use. It's a Durand Wayland 500 gallon pto driven rig with a 36 inch 12 blade fan. Here we are spraying copper on early in the spring.(this was last year)


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## Orchard6

The business end of that sprayer!


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## Orchard6

Here we are pounding posts for a trellis system for a new high density planting. These are becoming very common in our area. The trees are spaced 4 ft apart with a 14 ft drive row between them.


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## Orchard6

I'll have to look around and see if I can find some more pics of our specialty equipment. I'll post back soon!


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## Orchard6

Oh, and if there is any questions feel free to ask!


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## bluefarmer

Very interesting


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## Bonfire

This is production agriculture! Kudos.


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## FarmerCline

Really impressive and nice looking operation you have there. Thanks for sharing.


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## IH 1586

Great pictures. It is neat to learn about different ag businesses.


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## Orchard6

These are trimming machines, they are basically 3 wheeled self propelled man lifts, with hydraulic trimming tools.


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## Orchard6

After the trees are trimmed we either grind the brush up or push it out of the rows. Either way is very hard on equipment.

This is after a pass with a Rears Brush Flail


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## Orchard6

Then spring finally rolls around and we get to look at Michigans state flower, the apple blossom for a week or two.

We let these little guys do their thing while the blossoms are open.


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## rjmoses

Wow! That is quite impressive!

My area used to be known as the "Apple Kingdom" (Google "Calhoun County, IL Apple Kingdom") but that time has long passed. Our biggest operators now have maybe 40 acres of apples. A lot have switched over to peaches, but overall, orchards have been replaced by row crops.

Biggest issue is labor. The high school used to let boys go home at 1PM in the fall so they could pick apples. But that got replaced by migrant workers and now those are hard to come by, so most people bulldozed the orchards out and started row cropping.

I remember my grandfather siphoning water from a ditch to fill his horse drawn sprayer. How he got that siphon to work is something I'd love to know.

Ralph


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## swmnhay

Cool pics.How many different varieties do you grow?


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## bluefarmer

I've got about a dozen apple trees. How is the proper way to trim them


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## Vol

Orchard, excellent composition on your orchard....sometime when you have a few extra minutes I would be interested to learn more on the high density plantings...and how that changes your processes.

Regards, Mike


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## Shetland Sheepdog

Do you package all in bags, or do you also do count packaging? Brookdale also has an immersion dumper, although it's a smaller less sophisticated grader set-up with no auto packaging.


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## Shetland Sheepdog

I "liked" the whole topic, but ran out of "likes"! :huh:

How many employees does it take to run the packing house?

How many orchard sprayers do you run routinely?


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## Orchard6

Then it's back to more of this. We spray before any forecasted rain and after. We use a ton of fungicide! We have 4 sprayers that cover around 100 acres a piece. It's normal for us to spray 2-3 times a week from mid April until mid June. covering all 400 acres each time! We average about 200 hours a year per sprayer.


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## Shetland Sheepdog

Is that an A, B, or BN with the belly mower?


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## rjmoses

They used to spray sulfur as a fungicide(pesticide?) here--Do you use sulfur? (They also sprayed arsenic, but I don't think you can buy that anymore.)

Ralph


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## Orchard6

To answer some questions, it takes about 20 employees to run the packaging facility. We pack from Labor Day until the end of May, so we usually have lots of moms with kids in school that work for us since our schedule coincides with the school year. 
Yes we do pack tray and cell type packaging as well. These would be apples for individual sale at the store.
As for varieties we grow, Red Delicious, yellow delicious, Macintosh, law Romes, green Romes, gala, Fuji, Jonathan, honey crisp, Jona-golds, spys empires and Ida reds. 
There is definetly an art to trimming apple trees. Basically you want the main part, the trunk to grow strait up. Many people tend to let them grow more into a bush which will work but your apples won't get the color in the center of the tree. When you trim the out side of the tree you are kind of looking for a Christmas tree shape.


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## Orchard6

Shetland Sheepdog said:


> Is that an A, B, or BN with the belly mower?


That's a 1941 A with a 42 inch Woods belly mower. I use that for mowing my lawn!


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## Orchard6

rjmoses said:


> They used to spray sulfur as a fungicide(pesticide?) here--Do you use sulfur? (They also sprayed arsenic, but I don't think you can buy that anymore.)
> 
> Ralph


Sulfer is still used on occasion but we don't use it very often. Arsenate hasn't been available for a looong time. My grandad used to spray lead, arsenate, sulfer and DDT with an open station tractor with little more than a handkerchief tied around his face! He lived to be 84!


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## Shetland Sheepdog

Your grandfather reminds me of my old boss! we sprayed with Captan & DDT, as our main chemicals, back in "the day"!

He is still doing 50% of the spraying to this day! He's in his mid eighties!

Back then he was using a Fordson New Major pulling a Bean 500 gallon Speed Sprayer powered by a Hercules 6 cyl flat head!

Now he's in a New Holland T4050F with full cab pulling a Rears air blast 400 gallon PTO drive sprayer!

They have 3 of those setups!

Incidentally, they are one of the pioneers of using IPM in our area!

For the uninitiated, IPM = integrated pest management.


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## Orchard6

With a lil' water, some sun and help from the good Lord we end up with these little beauties!
These are Early Chief Red Delicious. These color much faster than a standard red from years ago. 
About mid to late August we start putting empty bins in the rows according to how they will be picked. Galas and Macintosh are the first verities we pick here.


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## Orchard6

This is one of the rigs we use to haul empty bins out to the orchard as well as picking the bins up and hauling them out after they've been filled.

All loaded up and ready to head to the cooler!


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## Orchard6

Vol said:


> Orchard, excellent composition on your orchard....sometime when you have a few extra minutes I would be interested to learn more on the high density plantings...and how that changes your processes.
> 
> Regards, Mike


Thank you! 
The idea behind the high density planting is 2 fold, first it gets you into production sooner. A standard free standing semi dwarf tree usually takes 5-8 years depending on veriety and soil conditions to produce a measurable yield. With the high density we can produce good yields in as little as 2-3 years. This is possible because the trees are tied to the trellis for support so the tree doesn't have to waste energy growing a strong supporting trunk or root system like the free standing trees do.
The second reason for high density is that you can nearly double your bpa average. Our average for free standing mature orchards is in the 900 to 1200 bpa range. With the high density we would like to see averages in the 1600 to 1800 bpa range.
The trellis system is very expensive to install and maintain but if your good at managing it it is well worth the effort.
As far as equipment changes and such we as fruit growers are going against the grain of most row crop guys and are buying smaller equipment to fit down narrower rows. We used to use 10 and 12 foot wide equipment and are slowly changing over to 8ft equipment. Our tractors are also getting narrower too, but are not lacking in the pto horsepower that we need.


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## rjmoses

Looking at that crate trailer, it occurs to me that a modified version of that could be spiffy for hauling round bales. Is that a commercial trailer? How do you load/unload that little darlin'?

Ralph


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## Teslan

I'm wondering about the timing when you pick the apples. Do you pick them when they are ripe or do you pick them a little green like Bananas, strawberries, tomatoes? I've never tasted a bad apple from the store, but tomatoes, bananas and most other produce tastes a lot better if ripened on the plant/tree. I was given some apples from a tree earlier this year and they tasted the same as any store bought apples. Also how long can one keep an apple in storage? I mean without your cooler? I never know how old the apples actually are that we buy in the store.

What's the difference between organic apples and conventionally grown apples? Is there really much of a difference? Do you grow organic ones?

Thanks for posting all these pictures. It's nice to see how apples are grown and processed.


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## Orchard6

rjmoses said:


> Looking at that crate trailer, it occurs to me that a modified version of that could be spiffy for hauling round bales. Is that a commercial trailer? How do you load/unload that little darlin'?
> 
> Ralph


The bin trailers are commercially sold in our area. The ones we use are manufactured by Phil Brown Welding in Conklin Mi. 
The bins are hauled up or down by means of 2 #80 chains that are driven by a hydraulic motor in the front of the trailer. They have hydraulic cylinders on the axle to raise or lower the frame to get under the runners of the bin.
I have thought of trying one on round bales but I think the chains could be hard on the twine or net wrap.


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## Orchard6

Teslan said:


> I'm wondering about the timing when you pick the apples. Do you pick them when they are ripe or do you pick them a little green like Bananas, strawberries, tomatoes? I've never tasted a bad apple from the store, but tomatoes, bananas and most other produce tastes a lot better if ripened on the plant/tree. I was given some apples from a tree earlier this year and they tasted the same as any store bought apples. Also how long can one keep an apple in storage? I mean without your cooler? I never know how old the apples actually are that we buy in the store.
> 
> What's the difference between organic apples and conventionally grown apples? Is there really much of a difference? Do you grow organic ones?
> 
> Thanks for posting all these pictures. It's nice to see how apples are grown and processed.


Usually apples are picked just before peak ripeness to be certain that they can withstand being stored in a cooler or controlled atmosphere room until they are ready to be packaged. Some verities much like hay have many different types of sub verities within that strain, such as with red delicious for example, there are early chiefs, red chiefs, crimsons and about a half dozen other strains that are all called red delicious. Some like early chiefs will gain color at a faster rate than they internally mature. We pick these when the have full color and not necessarily when they are internally ripe. We do this to get them to the stores earlier. Apples are usually considered a seasonal crop and it pays better to sell them in the fall when they are in season vs later in the year.

As to how long you can store them that all depends on the veriety and conditions that they are stored. Verities like red delicious will store longer than say a honey crisp. In the average house hold fridge I'd say about 2-4 weeks of storage life is acceptable.

In our controlled atmosphere rooms we can store them up to 9 months!


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## BrangusFeeder

Wow!

I love the idea of orchards. But this shows how much more major equipment is actually involved than just having acreage with trees.


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## Orchard6

Here is a pic of the tree transplanter. One man drives the tractor, another rides the transplanter facing rearward and 2 guys work handing trees to the guy in the seat. It's a slow process but much faster and easier than the shovel grandad used!


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## dubltrubl

Amazing thread! Thanks so much for sharing!


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## Orchard6

A view from the seat of the transplanter. There are over 400 trees in each row here!


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## Orchard6

Here is a video of the O-6 mowing in an orchard. Sorry it's pretty poor quality!


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## deadmoose

Excellent thread. Thanks for sharing.

What kind of fertilization schedule are the trees on?

Second question:did you bush hog tree trimmings to let them rot? It is reminding me about time to trim my fruit trees. My favorite part is smoking meat with the trimmings. Apple wood is by far my favorite. Is selling chips more work then it is worth?


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## rjmoses

Orchard6 said:


> The bin trailers are commercially sold in our area. The ones we use are manufactured by Phil Brown Welding in Conklin Mi.


Looking through their web site, these guys are super engineers! their equipment lineup shows a lot of ingenuity and creativeness. I'm impressed.

Wonder what they could do with the hay business if they put their minds to it?

Ralph


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## Orchard6

deadmoose said:


> Excellent thread. Thanks for sharing.
> What kind of fertilization schedule are the trees on?
> Second question:did you bush hog tree trimmings to let them rot? It is reminding me about time to trim my fruit trees. My favorite part is smoking meat with the trimmings. Apple wood is by far my favorite. Is selling chips more work then it is worth?


The trees are fertilized both thru ground applied granular fertilizer and liquid foliar fertilizer. Unlike other crops we can apply fertilizer based on the crop that the trees set. If its a heavy crop we add more nitrogen if it's a lighter crop we wont apply as much.
We chop a large portion of the brush from trimming and it does indeed just stay in the row and decay. It would be a hassle for us to try and market the brush for use in smokers as we usually only have 10 days to 2 weeks to get the brush out of the way so that we can begin spraying.
We do however let people come in and cut all the free firewood they want when we take an older block out!


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## deadmoose

That would be some geeat firewood. Lots of btus in apple. It would almost be sacrilege to use as just firewood. Gotta do what works though.


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## Orchard6

rjmoses said:


> Looking through their web site, these guys are super engineers! their equipment lineup shows a lot of ingenuity and creativeness. I'm impressed.
> 
> Wonder what they could do with the hay business if they put their minds to it?
> 
> Ralph


Yes, Phil is quite the engineer and fabricator. They make a lot of the specialty equipment we use, chances are if a piece of equipment is yellow in any of my pics, it came from Phil!


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## Tim/South

This is a very interesting thread. Thank you for taking the time to post the pictures and share the view from the inside.

I was visiting an Amish community in Tennessee a few years ago and a shipment of Michigan apples came in. It was the first shipment of the season. Everyone got excited and were hurrying to go to the central location and get their apples. It was a big deal for them.


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## Shetland Sheepdog

Stopped by Brookdale yesterday! I was checking out some of their 30+ tractors! They have them tucked in everywhere! Even got 5 of them in the packing house! Besides the 4 narrow orchards, for spraying/mowing, they have 4 compacts for working in the dwarfs! They are planning to pull out a bunch of M7 semi dwarfs, and replace with dwarfs on trellis! Said the trees alone would cost about 100K!


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## FCF

Have enjoyed all the information and pictures. Thanks!


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## Orchard6

I'm glad everyone enjoyed the "tour" of our operation! 
Wow Shetland, Brookdale must be a good sized operation to have 30+ tractors! We run 9 tractors including my 3 antiques. And yes it gets expensive planting 800+ trees per acre at $8 a tree! Plus posts, wire and labor aren't cheap by any means either.


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## Shetland Sheepdog

Their orchard operation is some smaller than yours, but they also run an extensive small fruit and vegetable operation!. their 2 primary vegetables being sweet corn & tomatoes. Primary small fruits being strawberries & blue berries.
I think they picked around 120K bushel of apples in 2014.
Here's their web site:
http://www.brookdalefruitfarm.com/
Dave


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## Orchard6

Shetland Sheepdog said:


> Their orchard operation is some smaller than yours, but they also run an extensive small fruit and vegetable operation!. their 2 primary vegetables being sweet corn & tomatoes. Primary small fruits being strawberries & blue berries.
> I think they picked around 120K bushel of apples in 2014.
> Here's their web site:
> http://www.brookdalefruitfarm.com/
> Dave


That looks like quite the operation!


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## Shetland Sheepdog

I was talking with one of the owners at Brookdale this morning! They are planting their trellis trees in 11' or 12' rows, and 3' or 4' in the rows depending on the rootstocks!


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## Orchard6

There are a few guys here planting 12x2! That is a lot of trees per acre. Our neighbors have one orchard planted at 12x2 and said they didn't like it and where going to go back to 14x3-4 like their other plantings.

We are fairly late to the trellis party around here, as most guys started 10-15 years ago and we just started 3 years ago. We are still learning but it's nice that our neighbors have more expierance and help point us in the right direction.


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## Shetland Sheepdog

Is the norm to pick/harvest the trellis tree fruit from ladders or from platforms?


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## FarmerCline

Orchard6 said:


> There are a few guys here planting 12x2! That is a lot of trees per acre. Our neighbors have one orchard planted at 12x2 and said they didn't like it and where going to go back to 14x3-4 like their other plantings.
> We are fairly late to the trellis party around here, as most guys started 10-15 years ago and we just started 3 years ago. We are still learning but it's nice that our neighbors have more expierance and help point us in the right direction.


 What is the closest spacing you use without having to put up a trellis? I'm thinking about adding on to my small orchard and I'm not sure that I want to go with a high density planting and having to put up a trellis and was wondering what the closest spacing I could use without going to a trellis.


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## Orchard6

Some use platforms and others pick with step ladders. I'd say the majority use ladders around here. 
As far as tree spacing, it will depend on your rootstock and how vigorous the tree variety is. We have some free standing trees planted 20x7 and that is a bit tight. I prefer a 20x14 for semi dwarf trees.


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