How We Work To Protect Our Environment
At Whittier Fruit Farm, we want to produce top-quality fruit for our pick-your-own and fresh picked customers. We want to grow fruit while we protect our environment, using pesticides judiciously when necessary. And we want our fruit to be affordable for everyone.
With these goals in mind, we gave up “calendar” pesticide sprays years ago, no longer applying chemicals every five, seven, ten, or fourteen days, as was the traditional practice in our region. We now use the integrated pest management (IPM) program developed by Cornell Cooperative Extension. This program involves scouting the orchard for pests, monitoring temperature and rainfall, and only spraying when we’re sure there’s a need. With IPM, we can choose to protect the trees and their fruit from damage if we know it’s likely, or we can wait and then eradicate a pest once it comes into the trees.
IPM takes into consideration the life cycles of insects and diseases and the ability of the trees and the crop to tolerate some damage. We are also aware that there are plenty of insects and mites in the orchard that are beneficial because they eat the bugs that harm the apples. We want to do as little harm as possible to those beneficials.
It’s not so long ago that lead arsenate—that’s right, lead plus arsenic—was the primary pesticide in orchards. Fortunately, nowadays more advanced chemistry is available. Many of the insecticides and fungicides available to fruit growers are soft on the environment and on beneficials. It’s part of our job to keep them available by using them properly. If you overuse a pesticide, the target pest can develop resistance, and then the chemical doesn’t work anymore. When that happens, growers have to fall back on less desirable materials. We are careful to use pesticides in a kind of rotation so that we don’t encourage resistance.
We are sometimes asked why we don’t grow fruit organically. Organic systems, using no synthetic pesticides, but instead only naturally-occurring materials, work best in environments where pest pressure is low. Most organic apples are grown in the arid inland deserts of eastern Washington, California, and British Columbia. There are very few insects, diseases, and weeds there because there is very little available water. Those places are fairly inhospitable to life, and the fruit trees only survive because of enormous irrigation projects, such as those that take water from the Columbia River.
Here in the East, pest pressure is very high. Look around—this area is teeming with life. All kinds of plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi thrive here. It’s much more difficult to control pest organisms when there are so many and they have such friendly conditions—pleasant temperatures, plenty of water, rich soils, an abundance of plant material.
There is some organic production of apples in western New York, but it’s much more chemical-intensive than conventional systems, because the organic materials must be applied more frequently. Fuel use is far increased, too, because the tractor must make so many more trips through the orchard. Interestingly, many of the materials used in organic production are more toxic than those used in conventional systems.
Sulfur, for instance, is the primary fungicide organic growers use to combat apple scab and other diseases. Continued, frequent applications of sulfur are tough on the orchard ecosystem, acidifying the soil. Other organic pesticides are as dangerous for the farmworker applying them as many conventional pesticides are. None of these organic materials will leave a toxic residue on the fruit, as conventional pesticides could, it’s true. But our use of pesticides follows federal and state regulations, along with our own IPM guidelines, and we are confident that we are selling you fruit that is absolutely safe and a health-promoting part of your diet.
The organic fruit produced around here is often of lower quality than we would want our customers to pick, with a high percentage infested with insect larvae, the fruit smaller and often blemished. It’s best used for processing. When you encounter organic fruit in a supermarket, you’ll notice that it’s often more expensive than conventionally produced fruit. It’s important to us that everyone be able to afford plenty of fresh, locally-produced fruit. Under an organic system, our prices, even for lower-quality fruit, would be much higher.