Spring 1997
A Stone Fruit
Renaissance

Both Consumers and Farmers
Benefit From Revival of Old
Nectarine, Peach and Plum Varieties

By Mark Thompson

Unseasonal springtime rain showers occasionally wipe out an entire variety of Art and Kurt Lange’s peaches or nectarines. If the fruit that the Langes have spent a year irrigating, pruning, fertilizing and monitoring has just begun to ripen when the rains hit, the crop can turn to mush practically overnight, a victim of rain-induced brown rot. 

Photos: Susan McLearan

Art Lange on Honeycrisp Farm

At a time when many American farms are consolidating, getting bigger, striving for ever greater economies of scale, the Langes and dozens of other farmers in California's Central Valley are moving in the opposite direction: diversifying, putting in a few trees of everything they can find. What these farmers have in common is that they grow for farmers markets.

For them, diversifying is first and foremost a marketing necessity. They need to have a small quantity of several varieties of fruit to take to the markets each and every week. That calls for orchards composed of many tiny blocks of trees with staggered harvests.

The diversity vastly increases management headaches, starting with simply remembering--and communicating to workers--where the Queen Crests trail off and the Crown Princes pick up. But the diversity also yields many fringe benefits, not all of which are readily apparent to outsiders.

One is providing stable employment for workers, quite in contrast to the conventional farming operations that depend on having a large pool of workers sitting around waiting for work that comes in short, intense but widely spaced bursts. This pervasive large-scale style of farming accounts for the fact that the unemployment rate in the major agricultural counties of the Central Valley is permanently stuck in double digits.

Diversified farms geared for farmers markets have different labor needs. Richard Burkart’s family farm near Dinuba is a case in point. It has gradually evolved in recent decades from a commercial citrus operation to a producer of a wide array of fruit for farmers markets. The farm now constantly needs the full attention of the Burkarts and members of two other families who live and work on the farm full-time. "They’re a part of the farm," Burkart says.

Another advantage of diversity, as the Langes learned anew each spring, is some protection from a knockout blow by the weather. To be sure, even a farm as diversified as the Langes’ can’t dodge weather as atrocious as that which descended upon the farm in the winter of 1995. As Lange recaps the story on Honeycrisp Farm, first there were destructive winter winds that knocked down branches and whole trees. Then it rained hard during the bloom. When the trees finally blossomed, it was so cold "the bees didn’t get out of bed" and so didn’t pollinate the fruit. Then a hail storm came along. Later in June, a virtually unprecedented second major hail storm swept through, wiping out the grapes and pockmarking all the young apples and citrus, leaving them marketable but at a discount.

Many of the Langes’ varieties that year were a total loss. But other varieties produced enough that they were able to cover the costs of their labor to keep the operation going another year. Even at that, the Langes were far better off than some of their neighbors. "In 1995, I know lots of people who didn’t pick a single piece of fruit," says C. Lynn Thomas, of the Tulare County agricultural commissioner’s office.

To stretch the harvest at each end of the season, and to fill all the gaps in between, those who grow for farmers markets look to newly developed varieties--such as cross-bred pluots and plumcots and late-season marvels such as Tra Zee peaches--as well as to older varieties. But they have found that the latter types of fruit--varieties that have been passed over by fruit wholesalers and in some cases nearly forgotten--are the richest vein to mine. As a result, farmers markets are at the center of a renaissance of varieties that couldn’t stand up to the rigors of being shipped to supermarkets but taste great such as the Babcock peach, Snow Queen nectarine, Elephant Heart plum and dozens of others.

Burkart Farms, which produced a handful of varieties of citrus fruit in its mainstream commercial days, now has a single-spaced two-page list of the varieties growing on the farm’s 65 acres. John Hurley, another Tulare County fruit grower, has 26 varieties of peaches and 15 varieties of plums, many of them with no more than 15 trees each. Steve Goossen’s family farm, near Dinuba 30 miles south of Fresno, holds about 50 varieties of stone fruit.

But few Central Valley fruit farms are as diversified as the Langes’. They have well over 200 varieties--from stone fruit to apples to citrus to grapes, to more exotic fare such as pomegranates--tightly packed with 8 feet between trees and 12 feet between rows on their 15 acres. But they’re not about to stop looking for more to add to their collection. "We have to constantly keep trying new things because new varieties keep coming out," explains Lange. To maximize the experimental possibilities with new plantings, they usually start three varieties per row and after a few years graft all of the trees over to the one variety that starts out strongest and tastes best.

As good as their favorites are, however, they avoid the temptation to put too many of their fruit in one type of tree. "We stop at about 100 trees per variety," says Lange. "That’s all we can pick and sell."

Experimenting with fruit was a profession even before Lange bought his own farm. He grew up on a farm in western Washington, but after he earned a degree in horticulture in college, he went on to become a researcher and a cooperative extension agent connected with university agriculture departments, a career that included a six-year stint at the Pineapple Research Institute in Hawaii, where Lange’s special area of expertise was the sex life of the papaya.

After moving to California, Lange started farming on the side in 1970. He took up farming full-time upon his retirement from his university job in 1987.

His scientific curiosity still sometimes gets the best of him, such as in his ongoing attempt to grow papayas in the Central Valley. He has grafted commercial varieties of papaya onto tough mountain-papaya root stock. This spring, he moved his plants from a greenhouse to the field, where they aren’t thriving yet but neither have they died. So there is hope.

His experiments don’t end in the fields. Lange constantly tinkers with ways to dry fruit and to make juice. In one barn, for example, he has built a steam extraction device for gently separating fruits from their juices. He mixes the juice in a number of unique combinations, such as his favorite, a pink lemonade made with the juice of Meyer lemons and pomegranates.

Farmers markets have shaped Lange’s farming operation from the start. He began selling fruit at the Santa Monica in the mid 1970s, and he has tried out more than 50 markets since then. These days Kurt Lange generally covers the markets in Southern California while Art Lange takes the markets in the north. They are usually on the road for two or three days at a time, hitting three or four markets on each trip, before returning to the farm to pick the next variety that is coming into harvest.

It’s a grueling schedule, but they enjoy the face to face contact with customers, and besides there’s no going back. "We couldn’t sell to supermarkets even if we wanted to," explains Lange. They don’t have nearly enough volume of any one variety. And many of the varieties that they consider tastiest, such as Snow Queen and Arctic Rose nectarines, have some serious shortcoming from an agronomic standpoint.

In many years, the Elephant Heart plum, for example, does well to produce one fruit per tree. This year, better than many, he got perhaps a dozen. The Elephant Hearts have to be left on the trees much longer than other varieties to build up sugar, but they’re well worth the wait, Lange says.

The May Diamond nectarine has the "perfect balance between acid and sugar," he says. But they will split at the drop of a hat.

The Snow Queens, which he doesn’t hesitate to call the absolute best fruit of all, has "tremendous drawbacks commercially," from erratic production and a proclivity to bruise to an odd green-yellow color that doesn’t fit the conventional deep-red image of a well ripened stone fruit. But those who know it can’t get enough.

In fact, Lange says that in a market recently an Israeli man recognized them and said they are grown in Israel and flown by air to leading chefs who have made it the number one desert fruit in Europe.

Sampling is a key to the success of the Langes’ operation. Art Lange can often be found at the Honeycrisp table in farmers markets dressed in white coveralls and white cap stitched with the name, Honeycrisp, wearing plastic gloves and with a knife in hand, cutting up samples. That’s the best way to demonstrate that an greenish nectarine can be much tastier than a perfect looking red one, and that his fruit is worth a premium price.

Indeed, the price, itself, that the Langes and other farmers market farmers have to charge for their fruit--often around $2-3 a pound--can be a daunting marketing challenge at a time when Ralph’s is taking out full-page newspaper ads touting 49-cents-a-pound peach specials.

Farmers who go to the considerable trouble of growing and picking fruit specifically for farmers markets explain that they have to charge extra for the same reasons that their fruit is so special. "We try to pick when the fruit is very ripe--so ripe that you can’t sell it to the supermarkets. As a result, we have a lot of loss from overripeness. It’s sort of like gambling," explains Lange. "People think we’re gouging them, but we’re not. If we sold at supermarket prices we’d be out of business in no time flat."

The delay in picking makes for a big difference in the product. Fruit left on the tree "goes from ordinary to exquisite in three or four days," says Lange.

Hurley, too, reports that some customers gripe about the price, saying that such-and-such a supermarket had peaches for 45 cents a pound. "That may well be. But we pick and grow our fruit in a completely different way," he says. "We let it hang on the tree one to two weeks longer. In the summer, when it is 100 degrees, that’s a huge amount of time. We let it gain as much sugar as it can."

The ripe fruit then has to be picked into small buckets instead of large bins. "It’s a lot different than the fruit you can get at the supermarket. It’s almost like oranges and apples," Hurley says.

To be sure, not all fruit sold in farmers markets is extraordinary, an entirely different thing than the fruit at Von’s or Ralph’s. In fact, some farmers market fruit not only is no better, it’s worse.

"There are way too many peddlers selling what’s left over on the docks from what the supermarkets didn’t want," Lange explains. Shoppers who stumble into that sort of fruit at farmers markets are disappointed with the quality and don’t come back, he says.

Hurley is in agreement with Lange about the nature of the problem. But he is somewhat more confident that consumers can figure it all out. "Consumers are aware that some fruit is grown in a different way, whether they know it or not. They’ll always go to quality." And when they find it, Hurley says, they will return for more of the same the next week.