—story and photos by Kate Prengaman
Every stone fruit grower strikes a balance between the harvest timing required to capture that tree-ripened flavor and the careful handling needed to get that fruit to customers.
At Lateral Roots Farm in Wapato, Washington, they err on the side of ripeness, picking in four or five passes and hand-packing the fragile fruit in the field before it heads to specialty stores on the state’s populous west side.
“We pick and pack and ship the next day, so consumers are eating (their peaches) in two to four days,” said Cherie Steinmetz, who co-owns the farm with three of her siblings and their parents. “That’s the buyers’ incentive too, because it’s truly tree-ripened fruit.”
Farming this way is a labor of love and logistics, but it’s working for the 100-acre Lateral Roots Farm, which the siblings — Cherie, Danae Yount, Trevor Perrault and Taylor Perrault and their parents — bought in 2018.
Harvest crews consist mainly of couples, with the women grading, sorting and packing as their husbands pick. It takes experience to pick only the fruit on the precise cusp of ripeness and to grade the fruit into multiple consumer packs for different markets. The farm pays hourly wages to incentivize careful work.
Most crew members have worked there longer than the owners. The siblings grew up on a nearby farm and jumped at the opportunity to farm together when the previous owner, Bert Pence, was looking to retire.
The peach boxes still carry the “Pence Peaches” name.
“We actually went through the trademark process for Pence Peaches, because his customers had really built a brand around that,” Cherie said. But they renamed the farm itself to recognize their own legacy: Lateral Roots nods to the farm location on Lateral A Road and the fact that they grew up on a hop farm along the same road.
“We grew up on Lateral A and then all moved on with our lives, and then here we are with Lateral A calling us home,” Danae said.
They bought the farm and bet on peaches (which account for 60 of their 100 acres) as Washington’s soft fruit production steadily fell. In 2020, citing significantly reduced acreage for peaches, nectarines and apricots, the Washington State Fruit Commission decided to halt assessments for collective promotions. According to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture census, Washington had 1,200 bearing acres of peaches in 2023, down from 2,400 in 2013. (The USDA stopped counting Washington’s nectarine acreage in 2014.)
That big picture doesn’t matter much to them, said Trevor. The orchard location sits in the “banana belt” of the Yakima Valley, well-suited for stone fruit. They have a successful niche and plan to stay in it.
“This does not scale well,” he said of their approach to tree-ripening and field packing. “I think we are at the acreage that we need for peaches.”
He and his siblings juggle the work of the farm with other careers. Taylor works in construction and as the farm’s mechanic. Cherie works for a hop company and handles Lateral Roots’ paperwork. Danae lives on the farm and juggles frost alarms, day-to-day operations and sales while raising her young kids. Trevor manages other orchards by day, bringing his experience to Lateral Roots and their approach to planting for the future.
When they bought the farm, they soon discovered X disease infections that required removal and replanting of some blocks. Trevor said he took that opportunity to modernize their variety mix to focus on quality and a consistent pace of harvest, but not the orchard systems.
“I see there’s some people move to higher density to get more tonnage per acre and all of the efficiency of labor, but for us, we stayed at this 18-by-12 planting on big Lovell rootstock, a traditional peach root, so our costs aren’t very high going into replanting,” he said. “It just doesn’t make sense to do that right now.”
He and Danae, who handles the farm’s logistics and sales, work together to plan how to pace the farm’s renewal. For example, they lease one Rich Lady block that’s nearing the end of its productive life, but they don’t want to remove it until a young block of Rich Lady comes into production. So, they pruned it hard for renewal, nursed it along with extra fertilizer and irrigation, and had a solid harvest last season.
“Anyone with a deep pocket would have wiped this out, but we had to make it work — and it did, and it was awesome,” Cherie said. As relatively new farmers, paying off the debt it took to invest in the orchard, those decisions add up, she said.
Next up in their business plan: possibly a commercial kitchen that would use the fruit too ripe to make the journey to retail and make value-added goods.
“The best, juiciest, sweetest fruit ends up on the ground,” Danae said. •
Being a UC Davis aggie and a longtime Pence peach fan I am happy that Lateral A is committed to the best practices and the best product. Proof that quality does still matter. Thank you Lateral A!