CBJ: Creating apple-growing niches

Apples have long been a part of Central Virginia. Thomas Jefferson liked them. Apples from here went, and still go, around the world.

But the way the area grows apples is changing.

Granted, some producers, such as Crown Orchard Company, still produce the familiar sorts of apples that get sent up and down the Eastern Seaboard, out to the Midwest and overseas.

But also on the rise, said Michael Lachance of the Virginia Cooperative Extension, is the niche grower.

In 1972, Albemarle County produced 13.9 million pounds of apples, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2004, the last year for which data are available for the county alone, it produced 11.4 million pounds. In 2009, Central Virginia as a whole produced more than 41 million pounds of apples, according to the department.

“The [big] growers that we have certainly have been in the industry for now one or more generations,” Lachance said.

Crown Orchard owns a variety of orchards. Almost all of them are in Albemarle, with a few trees in Nelson County. They’ve been at it since 1912.

They produce about 20 types of apples for big, commercial sale.

Cynthia Chiles, whose family owns the company, said that the number of acres in apples hasn’t been changing lately. The specific sort of apples they grow does change occasionally, she said.

“As customer demand changes, if we want to sell apples, we have to follow it,” she said.

“What you’re seeing is, on the one hand, very high-tech photo-optic sorting and grading and then this kind of mom and pop hand picking and sorting for small markets,” Lachance said.

The apples also show up in stores such as Foods of All Nations and Feast!, Lachance said.

Tom and Anita Weber have 120 trees of heirloom — old-fashioned — apples outside of Nellysford.

“We just felt there was a market for these,” said Anita Weber. “We were not really interested in growing anything that was commercially available.”

When the Webers started, it was devilishly difficult to come by affordable trees, and most came from small-scale producers, said Tom Weber. Early on, he bought a few trees from a Virginia Department of Transportation worker who grew the trees at home, farther east in the state. The next year, he couldn’t buy any more from the man, because deer had gotten into the trees and completely destroyed them, he said.

He stocks a variety of apple types. The first, Williams Favorite, are ready in July.

The Webers sell pretty much their entire crop at the Nelson County Farmers’ Market in Nellysford, though Tom Weber thinks that could change as the trees continue to mature and boost their production. The couple also sells garden produce at the market.

“It would be very difficult at the scale I’m at to make a living doing this,” the retired USDA worker said.

Another smaller grower is Vintage Virginia Apples in North Garden.

Several siblings bought a farm with and for their parents, and started growing interesting apples, said Charlotte Shelton, one of the siblings.

It’s an industry that, sometime ago, dominated the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge, she said.

They sell some apples, but they also make money in other ways, she said.

“We have about 250 varieties of apples, and that’s not a very sensible way to grow an orchard,” Shelton said.

But there is one thing that a huge variety of apples is good for: a nice cider, she said. The farm markets the cider through Albemarle CiderWorks, which sells hard cider, and sweet cider in season.

“We can use this polyglot collection of apples to good effect,” she said.

The group also runs a nursery, selling the hard-to-find trees. Most people buy between four and 12 trees, which is “manageable for an enthusiast,” she said.

Like many in the local-food movement, Shelton is a big proponent of the small-scale local farm, but she doubts they’ll ever become the dominant model in America, she said.

Still, just off U.S. 29, the project is doing well.

“There is a romance to this, and we’ve developed a little following, which is heartening,” she said.