B3
THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2021
Hal Bernton/Seattle Times
In this arid acreage north of Wenatchee, workers installed a massive grid of trellises. The trellises set the stage for more automation of the harvest.
Trellises are transforming Washington’s apple orchards
By HAL BERNTON
Seattle Times
UNION GAP, Yakima
County — This irrigated
slope used to be covered in
big, stout apple trees with
leafy canopies that could sup-
port a heavy crop of Golden
Delicious apples.
More than a half-decade
ago, excavators yanked them
from the ground.
In their place, grower
Aaron Clark planted spin-
dly, shallow-rooted stock
that needs to be attached
to trellises to keep the fruit
trees from collapsing under
the weight of the Pink Lady
apples they bear each year.
This dramatic makeover
is part of a broader transfor-
mation of Washington’s apple
orchards driven by the quest
to get bigger per-acre yields
of high-quality fruit from
trees that are easier to pick.
This shift has been under-
way for several decades, and
intensifi ed in recent years as
growers turned to new vari-
eties of apples that, when
splayed on trellises, can start
to bear commercial crops of
fruit in as little as three years
time. And the long, neat rows
of densely planted trees have
helped spur industry change,
including experimentation
with machines able to pluck
fruit without an assist from
human hands.
The cost of developing
these orchards is steep, and
can run $50,000 an acre or
higher. This has raised fi nan-
cial barriers for small growers
seeking to expand and remain
competitive, and increased
the risks — and debt loads
— for larger ones in a more
unsettled climate, which
included record heat this past
summer that damaged some
of the crop.
But the big dollars required
to bring these acres into pro-
duction have not discouraged
a new wave of orchard acqui-
sitions by outside investors
in an industry that produced
$2.1 billion worth of fruit in
2020.
One of the biggest sales
came in February 2019 when
the Ontario Teachers’ Pen-
sion Plan of Canada pur-
chased Broetje Orchards,
which spreads across more
than 6,000 acres around Ben-
ton City, Benton County, and
Wallula and Prescott, Walla
Walla County, and ranked
as one of the nation’s larg-
est family-owned operations.
While the total sale price was
not disclosed, the real estate
brought in $288 million,
according to a tax affi davit
cited by the Tri-City Herald.
This year, a lot more
orchard acreage is on the
market and prices are some-
times being driven up beyond
what can be justifi ed by the
annual harvest revenue from
the trellised orchards, accord-
ing to Clark, who is vice pres-
ident of Yakima-based Price
Cold Storage & Packing.
“It’s perplexing to us. I
think they are banking on the
long-term appreciation of the
land,” Clark said. “There’s a
huge wave of that coming.”
‘A wall of fruit’
The 58-year-old Clark is
a fourth-generation Yakima
Valley fruit grower who grew
up in a bygone era when Red
and Golden Delicious apples
grown on deep-rooted trees
dominated the east-of-the
Cascades apple industry. As
a teenager, Clark initially
wanted nothing to do with
orchards, but after one year of
junior college, he decided to
return to agriculture. Today,
he leads fi eld operations of
Price Cold Storage & Pack-
ing, which grows fruit on
some 2,700 acres.
Clark says that the older
generation of big trees did
have some advantages, such
as greater resistance to dis-
eases like fi re blight. But they
often yielded fruit of uneven
quality as apples grown deep
within the shaded canopy
lack sugar content.
Developing
trellised
orchards — where most of
the fruit receives ample sun-
shine — has involved a lot
of research and experimen-
tation. Clark seeks to match
an apple variety with a soil
and slope elevation that will
enable it to thrive. The cut-
ting, known as a scion, must
be grafted on compatible root
stock.
These plantings are care-
fully pruned and their water
closely rationed. The goal is
to put these trees under a lit-
tle stress so they put all their
energy toward making fruit
“If you just make a tree
happy, all it wants to do is
grow wood,” Clark said.
Things can go wrong
with this intensive orchard
cultivation.
Fire blight can decimate
some varieties of apples in
a trellised orchard if the root
stock is planted in poorly
drained soils, according to
Clark. And a poor match of
soil, root stock and variety
can produce a lot of medio-
cre fruit.
So Clark does some small
fi eld trials to see how things
work out before opting for
bigger plantings.
On a crisp November day,
Clark showed the payoff for
all this work, an orchard fi lled
with prime ripe Pink Ladies,
a “wall of fruit” ready for
harvest.
An automated future?
In the orchards Clark
oversees, pickers still climb
up and down ladders to pick
the apples. But it’s a simpler
task than in older orchards,
where some workers would
break with safety protocols
by climbing off the ladder
and onto the branches to try
to reach all the ripe fruit in the
far-fl ung canopy.
“Our biggest problem was
keeping the guys on the lad-
THIS DRAMATIC MAKEOVER IS PART
OF A BROADER TRANSFORMATION
OF WASHINGTON’S APPLE
ORCHARDS DRIVEN BY THE QUEST
TO GET BIGGER PER-ACRE YIELDS
OF HIGH-QUALITY FRUIT FROM
TREES THAT ARE EASIER TO PICK.
ders. They would want to
jump up in the tree, and we’d
have to get them down and
say quit doing that. But it was
just quicker and easier for
them,” Clark said.
In the trellised orchards,
the trees are essentially
two-dimensional. So the
pickers can place a ladder
on either side of the tree, and
from that perch quickly reach
most of the apples.
“I like this better,” said
Oscar Salgado, 37, a Yakima
resident who has been pick-
ing apples since he was 17.
On a typical day in these
orchards, Salgado picks up to
six bins of apples, which can
earn him $240.
Salgado is part of an
orchard workforce that
swelled to 300 at the harvest
peak and by early November
had tapered down to about
100. Their wages are on aver-
age slightly more than $20 an
hour. The top pickers, how-
ever, may make as much as
$35 an hour, per hour, accord-
ing to Clark.
While many growers have
turned to workers brought in
from Mexico or other coun-
tries under temporary H-2A
visas, Clark has been able to
attract enough local workers
from the Yakima area to get
the apples off the trees. He
plants varieties timed to ripen
in a progression stretching
from August to November.
But the cost of labor, and
the chronic shortages of U.S.
farmworkers, hase helped
to drive harvest automa-
tion, which can more readily
be accomplished in the uni-
form layouts of the trellised
orchards.
Already, some growers
have invested in elevated plat-
forms, which move slowly
down the rows on self-driv-
ing machines and enable
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pickers to do away with lad-
ders. In some models, the
apples can be put directly into
bins that sit on the platform.
During the past fi ve years,
there also has been a push to
fi gure out a way to harvest the
apples with mechanical pick-
ers. This is a diffi cult task as,
even with the aid of artifi cial
intelligence, some machines
have had problems, such as
bruising.
One high profi le startup
launched in 2016, Califor-
nia-based Abundant Robot-
ics, used a mechanical arm
to vacuum apples off trees
and send them into bins. It
was tested in New Zealand
in 2019 but this summer shut
down operations because it
“was unable to develop mar-
ket traction necessary to sup-
port its business during the
pandemic,” according to a
July 1 liquidation memo that
put assets up for sale.
Other companies con-
tinue to try to commercial-
ize automated harvesters,
including FFRobotics, an
Israel-based company that
tested its machine in Wash-
ington orchards this past
summer. This harvester uses
“advanced image processing
technology” to identify ripe
apples that are picked by six
arms that snip off the fruit.
“They were in an orchard
that was not known to the
public so they could work the
bugs out. At the end of the
of the season, we had sev-
eral fi eld trials,” said Ines
Hanrahan, executive direc-
tor of the Washington Tree
Fruit Research Commission,
which has worked cooper-
atively with that company
as well as others to develop
robotic pickers.
“We have to start automat-
ing if we are to sustain the
businesses. We have learned
from the failures and we feel
confi dent we will be able to
have a commercially via-
ble solution within the next
decade and probably earlier
than that.”
Clark is not eager for that
day to come.
“It would be good for
business, I think, but it would
be a sad day for me,” Clark
said. There’s a lot of things
about harvest I like, and all of
them involve the people that
we have coming here to work
… I don’t have any inter-
est in shaving every (exple-
tive) nickel out of everything
I can. These folks are my
neighbors.”
As he spoke, Mexi-
can music blasting from a
radio resonated through the
orchard rows as pickers fi lled
bag after bag with Pink Lady
apples.
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