10
CapitalPress.com
Friday, April 9, 2021
Trial and error: Learning to raise cider apples
By GAIL OBERST
For the Capital Press
OTHELLO, Wash. — You
farm and you learn, and you
keep going.
Paul Booker, whose family
has farmed in Eastern Wash-
ington since 1901, can attest
to that. He planted his first
apple test plot in 1997, and
with plenty of hiccups, had
expanded it to 3,000 trees by
2017.
Missteps are a valuable
tool for those who hope to
grow and market cider apples,
Booker said. He has shared his
challenges with other farmers
at two CiderCon gatherings
and with the Washington Tree
Fruit Research Commission,
admitting he still has a lot to
learn about growing tree fruit.
Despite setbacks, Paul, his
wife Jen, and three children,
ages 6 to 16, haven’t given up
on farming. His extended fam-
ily’s irrigated grain and row
crop farm near Othello contin-
ues to thrive. Even if it didn’t,
Paul, like many farmers, has
a side job: he is a mechani-
cal engineer who works on the
Hanford Nuclear Reservation,
training U.S. and international
law enforcement personnel
to combat weapons of mass
destruction.
Given the current world
situation, his job security is
rock solid. So, why bother
with farming?
Farming is just fun, and an
ideal environment in which to
Paul Booker with young
cider apple trees.
raise well-rounded kids, Paul
said.
He’s not the first farmer in
his family who has seen hard-
ships during the 120 years
since the Bookers established
a homestead between Othello
and Connell, north of modern
day Scooteney Reservoir. The
family farmed dryland wheat
in a region that gets an aver-
age of 8 inches of rain annu-
ally, meaning yields weren’t
great, even in good years.
Still, the family managed
to survive farming with mule
teams, shipping bags of wheat
on the railroad from Hatton.
Paul’s grandmother’s side
of the family planted orchards
in the early 1900s near
Wenatchee — cherry orchards
still in production when Paul
was young. Paul inherited a
‘71 Ford truck from that oper-
Cider apples growing at Paul Booker’s orchard.
ation, which his family still
uses.
When center pivot irriga-
tion arrived in the Columbia
Basin, his family rotated grain
and seed crops and leased land
to potato and onion growers.
These lower value commod-
ity crops for export suffered
with the rise of the U.S. dol-
lar, which prompted a closer
look at high-value tree fruit.
While working summers on
the farm, Paul and his brother,
Dan, now a civil engineer at
the Grand Coulee Dam, saw
the impact of the global econ-
omy on Northwest growers.
In 1997, Paul, with help
from his hometown sweet-
heart, Jen, planted the first
orchard test plot as a high
school project — putting in
Honeycrisp, Gala, Cameo
and Fuji varieties. Some grew
well, some didn’t. Most prom-
ising were cider apples, where
blemishes don’t matter. When
opportunities arose to mecha-
nize cider apples, the Bookers
expanded Paul’s high school
experiment.
In 2015, Paul returned to
farming full-time. Three gen-
erations helped him plant
1,000 cider trees in Othello.
While GPS steered the
tractor, as he was planting
corn at the home farm Paul
tapped the agricultural minds
at Washington State Univer-
sity, Penn State, Virginia Tech,
Michigan State and Cornell.
He got help from local grow-
ers, including Nolan Empey
at Sheffield Cider. In 2016 he
began pressing unique cider
juice purchased from other
growers that they marketed in
an auction-based model they
called CiderAuction.com.
“The first auction was a
bust,” Paul said. “We only
had a dozen online bidders
who got great deals on frozen
juice.”
Paul’s revised approach
was to sell his and other grow-
ers’ frozen juice online, go
back to his engineering job
in 2017, and buy a tiny urban
farm in West Richland, aimed
at keeping his family involved
in farming. The cider orchard
experiment languished while
his parents ran the main farm.
Meanwhile, the CiderAuc-
tion.com marketing model —
connecting NW growers with
cider makers across the coun-
try — saw its first small profit.
More lessons learned.
“The main farm and our
tiny farm are surviving,” he
said. When local schools
closed for the pandemic, the
Booker kids went to work
pruning trees and repairing
trellises in the orchard. Home-
school and remote school
families have visited the West
Richland farm to learn about
growing livestock, pump-
kins, corn, and of course,
apples, an educational com-
ponent the Bookers hope to
expand.
This spring, Paul’s fam-
ily planted another 400 cider
apple rootstocks in the main
farm’s orchard, and started a
small U-pick orchard in West
Richland.
S226617-1