Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/60127
The bin porch offers customers a wide choice, and they can buy any mixture at a fixed price for a full bag. On this day, there were 17 varieties of apples and pears for sale. Inside, the market is packed with gifts, value-added food items, and nonfood items. The market is composed of several rooms, the result of years of additions. Almost everything is spot-picked two to four times, Bruce said, with pickers doing the sorting as they choose which fruit to pick. At the end of a variety's season, what's left is stripped and shipped to Knouse Foods for process- ing, to Kime Orchards for pressing into juice, or to Rice Fruit for fresh sales of all that's suitable but in surplus after wholesale and retail sales. Customers come from a variety of places, Ellie said. Many are local, and she is working to encourage them to shop more regularly at the market. Hence the loyalty card program. Many are tourists who come to historic sites like the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg a few miles south. The National Apple Harvest Festival, first held in 1961 and held the first two weekends of October at nearby Arendtsville, ten miles from Gettysburg, draws thousands. A fair price Through their bin porch, the Hol- labaughs offer deals to customers who buy in bulk, usually a peck or more, and choose their purchases from field-run fruit. There, they sell at a compromise price between wholesale and retail and sell some lower quality fruit at a discount. In October, customers could buy a mixed bag of apples and Asian pears off the bin porch for 76 cents a pound—two to three times the wholesale price, but less than half the going retail price. The sign on the porch said the apples would cost $1.89 a pound at the supermarket. Inside the market, customers buy sorted and select high-quality fruit and pay more for it. "We don't charge small prices," Ellie said. "We know the quality of our fruit." More income per acre All this effort translates into more income per acre, Ellie said. How else would you support six families from 400 acres of fruit? "Purchasing additional land isn't really an option," she explained. "Most of the good orchard sites are already planted or have been developed for other uses. Bruce would like to plant in larger blocks." All the Hollabaugh orchard land is contiguous, and Bruce is reluctant to purchase fruit ground farther away. The need for diversity in the market—both to have lots of different kinds of fruits and to have them available fresh, in season—means managing small blocks, moving crews, boxes, and machines several times a day. A fruit block should be an acre, minimum, Bruce said, but there are exceptions. Because of other factors, like weather risk, one variety of fruit might be grown at multi- ple locations. The spray program, which Brad handles, is very complicated as well. Brad manages the pest management program and is the company's general administrator. "Spot picking is the name of the game," Bruce said, and that adds to the number of operations that need to be done. Responding to demand for new and different varieties requires an orchard renewal plan. "We have a renovation plan in place," Bruce said. "It keeps a certain amount of our land out of fruit at all times." Most Adams County fruit sites are quite old, and "We don't charge small prices. We know the quality of our Bruce's renovation plans normally call for four years between fruit crops. The land will be rented out to field- crop farmers for two or three years, he said, and then the last year planted to Dwarf Essex rape for its soil fumigant properties. Dagger nematodes are a problem, vectoring tomato ring spot virus on peaches. "It's hard to take good fruit." —Ellie Hollabaugh Vranich fruit land out for four years, and then have to wait even longer for fruit," he said. "But time and time again, we've seen the benefit in healthier trees, better quality fruit, and longer tree life." "We're definitely in a transition period," he said. "We actually sell fewer apples now (about 80,000 bushels) than when I came back to the farm (120,000 bushels). But we have many new plantings, now and production will rise rapidly in the next few years." Bruce is making most of his new apple plantings on a post and four-wire trellis system, primarily on Malling 9 rootstock, at tree densities from 650 to 1,000 per acre. He's moving toward a tall spindle training system and even higher densities. Red and Golden Delicious trees are being replaced, as age and productivity dictates, and new varieties—dictated by what's selling in the market—are being planted. "The constantly changing contours of the ground in Pennsylvania make it very difficult or, at times, impossi- ble to plant orchards as close as they use in the West," Bruce said. "Almost no ground on our farm is flat enough for that." His latest plantings are on a 4 by 14 foot spacing, and he wants to squeeze down more, toward 3 by 12 feet, or 1,313 trees per acre. Hollabaugh Bros. has about 40,000 bushels of cold- storage capacity and uses it to carry popular varieties of apples beyond their harvest season. The demand of the marketplace dictates just how long any one variety is kept. "Every year seems to bring its own marketing chal- lenges. Our goal is always to adapt to an ever-changing market—both in what we grow and how we sell it," Bruce said. "We've always been direct-market oriented. Popular varieties can change the whole dynamic of the market." GOOD FRUIT GROWER APRIL 1, 2012 17 • PHOTOS BY RICHARD LEHNERT