The world of agriculture is defined both practically and aesthetically by two poles: those farmers whose aim is to grow the greatest possible amount of food at the lowest possible price, and those whose goal is to grow the greatest quality of food no matter what it costs. Both are necessary. It would be a poor state of affairs if our grocery stores were filled with nothing but $6-a-pound peaches, no matter how exquisite they might be. And, of course, the opposite is equally true: what good does it do you to have all the peaches you can eat if none of them tastes like anything? Most growers fall somewhere in between, but at their extremes these two schools of thought operate in almost separate universes—despite the fact that the growers themselves might be farming right next door to each other.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the stone fruit belt of California’s San Joaquin Valley during the middle of summer. Almost all of the nectarines and about 60 percent of the peaches grown in the United States come from California. And about 90 percent of those are grown between Fresno and Visalia, a stone fruit belt no more than fifty miles wide encompassing the southern half of Fresno County and the northern half of Tulare County. That’s a hefty crop. Peaches alone account for almost $250 million a year, and nectarines are worth another $200 million. But this is an area almost uniquely suited to the growing of peaches and nectarines. In the winter, the heavy cold air of the Sierra Madre range slides downhill to rest along the banks of the Kings River. This phenomenon produces the area’s dense tulle fog, infamous among drivers, but it also gives the trees the chill they need to go dormant and get their off-season rest. In the summer the hot, dry weather is perfect for ripening fruit with a minimum risk of spoilage. Small towns—once market centers—are scattered every seven or eight miles along the railroad tracks that run up and down the valley’s spine.
Back in the 1890s, when agriculture was just starting in the area, that was about as far as a farmer could carry his crop, sell it and still get home in a day. Today the railroads have been replaced by almost impossibly straight highways. Scattered along the side of the road, among the vineyards and orchards, are 1960s brick ranch-style ramblers, along with the occasional Nouvelle Colonial stucco mansion. Here and there you can spot old plains-style farmhouses, some of them quite grand, given away by the telltale “tank house” out back that was originally used for storing water for household use.
Fruit packing sheds dot the area, and the quickest way to kill any romantic notions you might have about the nature of bigtime agriculture is to visit one in the middle of the summer harvest. The ungodly din, the frenzied activity, the seemingly endless supply of fruit—all your imagined bucolic scenes of Farmer Brown in his overalls handpicking his peaches will be swept away in an instant. This is where the industrial side of farming becomes clear—food grown on a massive scale and intended to be sold at a bargain price. Here is the source of almost all of the fruits and vegetables in your grocery store, and it is impossible to understand the modern produce section without understanding the differences between it and your peachy nostalgic dreams. These packing sheds tend to look much like any other light manufacturing plant: about the size of a football field, roughly two stories tall, made out of prefabricated metal and prefabricated concrete. From the outside, it can be hard to tell whether they’re for peaches or water pumps. Except for the lingering perfume of fruit, there are few clues inside either.
The machinery looks like some gigantic Rube Goldberg invention, a mechanical contraption so incredibly complex that it seems it couldn’t possibly serve any discernible purpose. But then it swings into action. At one end is a massive garage door, which opens to allow the entry of a truck loaded with field bins, each about the size of a large Dumpster. A lever locks onto a bin and gradually, with a loud mechanical groan, lifts and tilts it, spilling its load. Onto the padded conveyor belt tumble more nectarines than you have probably ever seen in one place, each of them perfectly round and gleaming candy-apple red. One piece of fruit after another, each seemingly more perfect than the last, shines and catches the light as it rumbles on its cushioned way from field bin to shipping box. The fruit couldn’t be more uniform if it were manufactured.
And in a sense, it was. This fruit was designed—you can almost use that word literally—to be grown, packed and sold on a massive scale. The trees are bred to be disease-free and heavy bearing. They are also selected to be short and compact, which permits easier picking (and reduces legal issues—tall trees require ladders, which increase an employer’s liability). They are heavily fertilized and watered, which creates the largest volume of the biggest, glossiest fruit.
Harvest is a combination of military operation and invasion by locusts. Starting at one end, pickers—almost uniformly Hispanic males—move from tree to tree, nearly sprinting, silent as ghosts. Even though the morning is already warming, they are dressed in sweats to protect them from the trees and the sun, and they wear baseball caps with short, dangling capes in back like the French Foreign Legion. There is no playing around; their concentration on the job is almost complete. They will eventually pick every piece of fruit they see, tossing nectarines over their shoulders into the big canvas buckets they carry like golf bags. When the buckets are full, they are emptied into the field bins, and the fruit is trucked to the packing sheds.
All of the fruit on a tree doesn’t come ripe at exactly the same time, of course, but picking is expensive, so most orchards like this will be harvested only two or three times, several days apart. (Most peach and nectarine varieties come ripe only for a period of ten to fourteen days.) A large-scale commercial orchard may cover 120 to 150 acres and include dozens of different varieties of peaches and nectarines. In one summer, it may produce more than 2,000 tons of fruit. Although there is considerable variability depending on the climate and the year, a little more than 10 tons per acre would be considered average for peaches, about 7.5 tons per acre for nectarines.
The fruit may be highly colored, but it is not yet ripe. The red coloring is a genetic trait that shows at a very low level of maturity. A ripe nectarine put through the packing process would turn to jam. Instead, the fruit is picked at a stage of physical maturity at which most of it can, if handled correctly, develop pretty good flavor.
Fruit is graded and sorted according to background color and softness of flesh. The lowest grade is “utility” and is reserved for fruit that is edible but may be cosmetically damaged. The next is “U.S. mature.” Then there is “California well-matured,” which ostensibly is harvested at a higher order of maturity. These days, about 90 percent of the peaches and nectarines harvested in the state qualify for this standard, so you be the judge as to how meaningful it might be. Fruit can also be labeled “tree-ripe,” but this is essentially meaningless, as the maturity standards are the same as for California well-matured.
At the packing shed, the first thing that happens is the fruit is sorted. The bins are emptied, and the nectarines roll down the conveyor belt in what seems like an endless river. These nectarines don’t necessarily come only from the orchard that was just being picked, but may come from several others as well—farms that are too small to have a packing shed of their own or that simply don’t want the bother. Here all the fruit is combined into one lot, sorted only by variety.
Women workers line both sides of the belt, culling any fruit that is obviously damaged. Rejected nectarines will be used for animal feed or fertilizer. The fruit that is left runs under an electric eye that sorts it by size. As each nectarine reaches the gate for its size, it is shunted through into the hands of one of the waiting women, who carefully places it in a packing case. Peaches and nectarines are typically packed into a two-layer cardboard tray container to a total weight of roughly twenty-two pounds. These containers are then stacked on wooden pallets and toted by forklift to be cooled.
This cooling stage is critical. At harvest the internal temperature of nectarines can be in the 90s. If left unattended, they would spoil in less than a day. The ideal storage temperature for peaches and nectarines is right at freezing —32 degrees (because they contain so much sugar, peaches don’t freeze until they get between 27 and 30 degrees). Much warmer than that, and the fruit enters the perilous “chilling injury” zone—roughly 35 to 45 degrees. The reasons behind the harmful effects of cold storage within this temperature range have not been fully explained, but the symptoms are well known: a cottony, dry texture and an absence of flavor. As little as a day spent at these temperatures can be enough to ruin a piece of fruit.
Different sheds cool their fruit in different ways. Probably the most common method is forced-air cooling, basically putting the fruit in a refrigerator the size of a handball court. The next most popular is hydrocooling, streaming ice-cold water over the bins, like putting the fruit under a giant cold shower. The Rolls-Royce of chilling techniques is vacuum cooling, but this is so expensive that it is used only for extremely perishable items such as herbs and leaf lettuces. The fruit is placed in a sealed container, and all of the air is pumped out. When the atmospheric pressure gets low enough, some of the moisture from the fruit begins to evaporate and cool the fruit.
Some shippers have begun using a new cooling process called “preconditioning,” which shows promise in eliminating chill injury. Developed by the University of California at Davis, it calls for the fruit to be cooled only to between 68 and 77 degrees and then to be held for twelve to thirty-six hours to allow the fruit to begin the ripening process. The fruit is then chilled to below 34 degrees for storing and shipping. The fruit is held in giant refrigerated rooms, with pallets stacked fifteen to eighteen feet high, until it is ready to be shipped.
With the fruit carefully tucked away for its nap, the action in the packinghouse shifts to the glassed-in offices that encircle the upper level. This is where the salespeople work the phones, frantically scrambling to sell all of the fruit that has just been harvested. Peaches wait for no one, even when picked so underripe, and they certainly won’t wait for a better price. For that reason, in produce country it is almost always a buyer’s market, and everyone knows that. Conversations are rarely about “How sweet are those peaches?” They’re almost always along the lines of “Is that the cheapest you can sell them?” On the other end of the phone are a wide variety of buyers. Some represent large grocery store chains; what they take will be trucked to their warehouses and then distributed to individual markets. Some are wholesalers, who will bring the fruit to large collective warehouses called “terminal markets,” where individual stores can buy them in bulk. Some are specialty companies that buy the fruit and then ripen it further before selling it to high-end users (either markets or restaurants).
At each step of the way, someone is making a profit. And by the time you track backward to the source of the fruit—the farmer—the prices can be shockingly low. Only about 20 cents of every dollar you spend on peaches at the grocery store winds up in the pockets of the people who grew them. (To put this in perspective, according to one university study, it costs about $11,000 an acre to grow, pick and pack peaches in the San Joaquin Valley, including amortizing the cost of the land and equipment. At an average yield of ten tons per acre, a grower whose peaches are selling for $2 a pound at retail will get about 40 cents of that, meaning that he will lose $3,000 per acre.)
Growing better-tasting fruit involves both money and risk. For a farmer every harvest is a race against time, weather and misfortune. Every day the fruit hangs on the tree is another day it might rain or blow, another day for bugs or birds or some other calamity to find it. Entire orchards of fruit have been lost because a grower gambled on waiting one more day and got hit by a hailstorm, wiping out a whole year’s work. The goal of a commercial farmer is to harvest the fruit as soon as it reaches a minimum quality standard. This is the way commercial agriculture has worked since at least the end of World War II. These farmers don’t see themselves as talented artists creating sensual masterpieces. They are technicians, and they are proud of how well they are able to feed so many people so cheaply. Given the realities they face, it really is a minor miracle that our fruit is as good as it is.
In the world of commercial farming, this kind of packinghouse stands at the pinnacle. It is a grower/packer/shipper, an all-in-one operation. It grows the fruit, packs it and has a dedicated sales crew to sell it. There are also individual growers, who farm the fruit and then contract to have it packed and sold. And there are packinghouses that do no farming; they pack and sell fruit from individual growers. Regardless of category, it is extremely rare—nearly impossible—for fruit grown by a single farmer to reach the supermarket without being mixed with someone else’s. As far as we are concerned, the farmers are faceless and nameless. So what is the incentive for someone who grows terrific peaches to invest in the extra work and money that it requires to do this, when his fruit is going to end up being combined with that of his neighbor, who might not necessarily have the same standards? There really doesn’t seem to be one. This is one of the great dilemmas of commercial agriculture: there are significant rewards for growing more fruit (in fact, it is almost required), but there are precious few for growing better fruit.
For a gifted farmer to reap the benefits of his talents and efforts, he is almost forced to go outside the normal supply chain. The most common escape route is the farmers’ market, which provides a grower with both blessings and curses in roughly equal proportions. If you want character—both in fruit and in farmers—these markets are certainly the place to go.
Two of the biggest stars at the Santa Monica farmers’ market are the stone fruit growers Art Lange and Fitz Kelly, small farmers whose orchards are practically next door to each other just south of Fresno. Bite into one of Lange’s Snow Queen white nectarines, and the flavor is enough to make you gasp. The first impression is of powerful syrupy sweetness. Then comes a tart tang that gives the sugar some backbone. Overriding everything is a mix of complex flavors, both floral and fruity, so mouth-filling it seems almost meaty. The fruit is so ripe that the juices drip down your chin; so ripe that a peach practically peels itself. Much the same can be said for Kelly’s Lady in Red peaches.
These days, when we consider ourselves lucky to get fruit that is simply sweet, it is easy to forget that something as basic as a peach or a nectarine can actually have the power to shock. Producing fruit like that is no accident of nature. It takes a gifted farmer, a lot of hard work and a refusal to compromise. Kelly and Lange have been growing such amazing fruit for so long that they have come to embody great farming. They remind us that growing food can be every bit the work of art that cooking it can be. Other growers have customers; Kelly and Lange have apostles. And here’s the thing: Kelly and Lange farm right in the middle of the stone fruit belt. The big boys are their neighbors, farming the same type of land, often with many of the same types of trees.
Kelly is a loquacious, good-looking Irishman with an impressive head of wavy silver hair and a bluff, boyo charm. Picture a younger, healthier Ted Kennedy with a farmer’s tan, perpetually clad in khaki shorts and a faded work shirt. As he bangs through the twenty-acre main orchard he’s owned for more than thirty years in a beat-up four-wheel-drive convertible, he can’t stop talking about the things that please him about the land, whether it’s the lineage of an odd fruit tree or the red-tailed hawks and great horned owls that live in the eucalyptus island at the center of his property.
Kelly came to farming almost by accident. He was working as a carpenter, looking for a farmhouse to fix up and sell, when he first found the property. But, he says, once he stepped on the land, he couldn’t leave. He bought the farm in 1972 and since then has added another fifteen acres. He lives in a two-story house he built over his packing shed. “A very smart man told me the most expensive part of any structure is the roof, so you ought to get as many floors under it as you can,” Kelly says. Practicality obviously wasn’t the only reason, though. Sitting on one of his decks, perched high above the surrounding countryside, you have a bird’s-eye view of hundreds of acres of nearby orchards, most of them big commercial operations he calls factory farms.
Kelly stops the car to snag a low-hanging white peach off a tree limb. It’s so sweet it almost tastes like a sugar cube. “Wow, we’ve got to test that one,” he says and slams back to his packing shed to pick up his refractometer—a device that measures sugar content. It’s the same tool winemakers use to tell when grapes are ripe enough to make great wine. This particular peach maxes the meter at 23 percent. (California well-matured fruit averages 11 to 12 percent. Anything over 18 percent, peach marketer Jon Rowley says, “almost goes beyond the human threshold for pleasure.”) Kelly looks pleased and tells about a peach he once tested that measured 30 percent.
By comparison with their neighbors, Kelly’s and Lange’s orchards look downright scruffy. The trees seem to be smaller and the weeds taller. That’s fine with them. Big healthy trees don’t necessarily produce the best fruit, they say. Sounding like high-end winegrowers, they say that they want to stress their trees to concentrate the flavor in the fruit. Lange points out the lush green foliage of his neighbor’s commercially farmed trees. “That’s really beautiful,” he says, “but you can only get that by using a lot of nitrogen, and that makes his fruit taste sour.”
Indeed, there’s little that can be more stressful than trying to grow fruit in the fine sand that makes up most of their farms. The soil is so nutrient-poor that Kelly jokes that he’s almost farming hydroponically. That is one reason—in addition to sheer contrariness—that neither Kelly nor Lange is certified organic (although both use only minimal amounts of chemicals and only when absolutely necessary). Stressed to the edge of survival, these trees need all the help they can get. From time to time and in carefully measured doses, fertilizers are fed in minute quantities. Watering is treated almost as an art form, with water being applied abstemiously following a carefully worked-out, highly regimented routine. (Despite being friends and farming practically next door to each other for decades, only recently did they discover that their “secret” watering techniques are practically identical.) Most of the time, they rely on beneficial insects rather than insecticides: the bad bugs are eaten by better bugs. And those aren’t weeds between the trees, but a carefully chosen blend of vetch, peas, barley, wheat, rye and wild oats that adds nutrients to the soil.
Lange, a tall man who is going a little stooped now that he’s in his eighties, bought his seventeen-acre farm in the early 1970s, when he was at the University of California’s nearby Kearney Agricultural Center. A weed scientist by training, Lange is one of the few farmers at any market with a doctorate in plant physiology. This tends to lend his conversations a professorial air.
While Kelly talks birds out of the trees, Lange is a gentleman of a few carefully reasoned, well-chosen words. Like Kelly, he lives in the midst of his farm. But while the Irishman’s aerie is an architectural flight of fancy, Lange’s couldn’t be more down-to-earth. He inhabits a one-room A-frame decorated in Early Bachelor Farmer. The walls are lined with bookcases full of agricultural textbooks, and the floors are stacked with technical publications. The A-frame looks more like a disorderly cross between a campus office and a storage shed than a home. “Look at our houses, and that sort of describes both of us,” Lange says.
Kelly and Lange pick their fruit nearly dead ripe, when it has already begun to soften. Lange’s goes straight from the tree into a packing tray lined with a single layer of individual protective cups. When that is filled, it is taken to a truck, where another worker sorts the fruit according to size. That is the last time it is touched until it gets to market. Picking fruit this ripe entails risks even beyond those associated with packing and handling.
When you follow the picking crew, the price of this gamble becomes obvious. Workers who harvest Lange’s famous Snow Queen white nectarines—which can sell for as much as $6 a pound—seem to leave fully half of the fruit on the trees. Maybe a nectarine is too small or is split (something the variety is prone to do); maybe it’s been gnawed by a pest. When the fruit that does pass muster gets to the truck for sorting, what seems like another half is discarded. The closer inspection turned up a bruise, excessive russeting from the sun or a spot on the neck where it rubbed against a twig. Few of these faults would have been obvious if the fruit had been picked a week earlier.
The cost of perfection is enormous. Whereas the average stone fruit farmer in California harvests about ten tons per acre, Lange and Kelly pick only two or three. This difference in sales volume could never be recouped through normal commercial channels; it is only by direct marketing that growers can get a premium for a great product. Peaches and nectarines at many supermarkets can go for less than $1 a pound, and even good farmers’ market fruit might sell for $2 a pound, but stone fruit grown by these two men fetches far higher prices. And people stand in line to buy it. Even at those elevated prices, however, the economics are tough. Multiply an average of $4 a pound by two tons per acre, and you’re still barely in the black—especially when the profit is spread over so few acres.
But even setting economics aside, life as a farmers’ market grower is not all artistic rigor and rustic bliss. There is a dirty, even a dangerous, practical side to it. Somebody has to get that fruit to the market, and in most cases it’s the farmer. Compounding the issue is the fact that most farmers’ markets start early in the morning. So, in addition to growing great peaches and nectarines, these guys have to be willing to jump in a pickup truck at the end of a long day and drive the four and a half to five hours to the big markets in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Every year in California, three or four farmers’ market growers are killed in automobile accidents while making this long, exhausting trek.
For Lange every week is a test of whether he still has the stamina to stay awake. His continued presence at farmers’ markets is strictly a week-by-week race against encroaching age. Highway time is not the only hurdle growers encounter in this phase of their operations. Because the early market starts usually dictate an overnight stay, farmers sometimes are forced to get creative in arranging accommodations. Some have friends in their market towns that lend them a couch, or even a room. For Lange and Kelly, the choices are often less hospitable. At dinner one night, the two spent half an hour comparing the relative merits of various residential construction sites in Santa Monica and Brentwood. Frequently, they end up spending the night in their trucks, parked in the driveway of a house that is unoccupied during remodeling.
It’s a challenging business, but what keeps Lange, Kelly and other farmers of their ilk going is the notion that what they’re doing is more than just a business. Sure, they have to earn enough money to keep going the next year—there are no arts grants for fruit growers—but these guys passionately believe that they’re saving the very idea of great-flavored fruits and vegetables from the blanding effects of modern farming. Like the Blues Brothers, they’re on a mission from a different god.
Ask Kelly about a commercial peach, and he goes practically apoplectic. “You know, I’ll tell you the truth,” he says. “The tomato has always been the example of what people hate about modern farming. They remember it tasting so great, and it doesn’t taste like anything anymore. I honestly think the peach is going to be in that league, too. All of these factory farmers, they’ve got an awful lot of facts. They can tell you how many hours of sunlight a peach needs, and they do everything by the rules. But their fruit doesn’t have any flavor.”
By now he’s nearly sputtering: “The question I always want to ask them is, ‘Would you eat that, Mr. Farmer?’ If the answer is no, then why do they think Harry Housewife would? Why would you want to pay for something that doesn’t taste like anything?”
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they’re shopping for fruit is assuming that what they see is what they’re going to get. Many fruits will improve if you can just leave them alone for a day or two.
There is a difference between maturity—basically, the development of sugar in a fruit—and ripening—the many physical changes that involve the softening of the flesh and the development of aroma and complex flavor. In most fruits, these two processes run concurrently and stop at harvest. But with some fruits, the ripening process can continue after the fruit has been picked, provided that it has attained a sufficient level of maturity.
Generally, these are known as climacteric fruits (and this is one instance where it is important to remember that avocados and tomatoes are not truly vegetables). To the agricultural scientist, the term “climacteric” refers to the physiological point at which fruits begin to ripen. (It also refers to humans of menopausal age: those of us who are fully mature but perhaps not yet fully ripe? And certainly not yet senescent!) Climacteric fruits are those that will ripen on their own, off the tree. They won’t get any sweeter; since the development of sugar is an effect of maturity, but their flesh will soften, and they will become more fragrant and complex in flavor.
Climacteric fruits are a real boon to farmers, who can harvest them when they are physiologically mature but before they have begun to soften.
Different climacteric fruits will ripen at different rates. Apples are among the most rapid. As a result, the apple industry has developed a whole host of procedures to delay the process. Slightly slower are apricots, avocados, muskmelons, plums, peaches and nectarines. Bananas and tomatoes ripen even more slowly.
There are two keys to ripening climacteric fruits after harvest. The first is temperature, which should be warm enough to encourage respiration, but not so hot as to promote spoilage. The presence of ethylene gas is also a boon. Ethylene is a natural gas given off by fruit as it ripens. In nature it serves as a kind of wake-up call: the first fruit to ripen begins to give it off, which lets the other fruit know it’s time to get busy.
You can buy all sorts of gadgets to help you ripen fruits, such as plastic globes, but all you really need is a paper bag and a spot on your counter. In many cases, you don’t even need the bag. It serves only to trap the ethylene gas and encourage even, rapid ripening. A bag helps most with slower-ripening fruits. For those that ripen more quickly, placing them on a plate or in a bowl will work just fine if you make sure to turn the fruit once a day or so to prevent any spoil spots from developing.
APPLES
APRICOTS
AVOCADOS
BANANAS
CANTALOUPES aka muskmelons (but not honeydew or watermelons)
FIGS
GUAVAS
MANGOES
NECTARINES
PEACHES
PEARS
PERSIMMONS
PLUMS
QUINCES
TOMATOES