—story and photos by Connor Gibbons, for Good Fruit Grower
With apple season at its peak across West Virginia and the mid-Atlantic region, the apple industry faces uncertainty around a second season with a surplus of processed apple inventory.
“From what we’re understanding, (processors) are in the same situation as they were last year; they’re going to be taking less volume,” said Don Dove, general manager of production and sales at Orr’s Farm Market in Berkeley County, West Virginia. “Anytime that the processing market is down, it also affects the wholesale market because the floor really lowers and the pricing, of course, lowers.”
Last year, a rescue effort in West Virginia saw the government purchasing roughly $10 million worth of apples from orchards and then distributing the fruit to people facing food insecurity. The processing-market problem of high inventory and low prices persists in 2024.
That worrisome trend led Dove and Katy Orr-Dove, his wife and business partner, to lean into the fresh market aspect of their business, opening a new, permanent farm market in Kearneysville this spring, in addition to their primary on-farm location in Martinsburg.
“Our farm market is about 50 percent of our business; it’s really growing. So, the local customers really support us,” Orr-Dove said. “The retail side of things definitely gives us protection where we have some diversity that other people don’t have on their farms. If they’re just growing for processing, they’re having more trouble than we are.”
The Orr family orchard currently operates on 550 acres in the region known locally as Apple Pie Ridge, which stretches across Berkeley County in West Virginia and Fredrick County in Virginia. West Virginia expects to harvest 1.8 million bushels of apples this year, and Virginia expects 4.8 million bushels, according to the U.S. Apple Association’s estimate.
Orr’s Farm Market produces approximately 275,000 bushels of apples and 60,000 bushels of peaches per year. The farm has been in Orr-Dove’s family since 1954, when the region focused primarily on processing fruit. Today, the family is exploring strategies that involve replacing processing blocks with varieties more suitable and desired for fresh consumption as they look, long term, at the price trends and international competition in the processing market.
Orr-Dove said she’s hopeful that the community continues to see supporting local farms as a matter of pride and patriotism.
“It comes down to food security,” she said. “If places like this start going out of business … that farm property will be developed into something else. It’s not going to be cheap to buy the property back and turn it back into a farm. It would be cheaper to protect what you already have.”
A rescue repeat?
Last year’s relief effort was pushed by West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and brought together resources from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and West Virginia Department of Agriculture to help pay for the seasonal labor to harvest the fruit, according to Aime Minor, the West Virginia Department of Agriculture’s assistant commissioner.
In late August, as Good Fruit Grower went to press, Manchin’s office announced $3.1 million in reallocated USDA funding to assist West Virginia’s apple growers facing ongoing oversupply.
“This critical funding will ensure that this year’s surplus of apples will be managed effectively, avoid food waste and help sustain the livelihoods of West Virginia farmers,” Manchin said in a statement. “I want to thank Secretary Vilsack and the USDA for helping to provide critical relief to West Virginia farmers and their families.”
Prior to that announcement, Minor said that if funding was available, the state was ready to execute a relief buy.
“I’m fully confident that, if we get those funds, we can move the apples quickly again,” she said.
A large portion of distribution in the 2023 rescue was taken on by the Farmlink Project, a nonprofit organization focused on the fight against food insecurity nationwide. Mike Meyer, Farmlink’s head of farmer advocacy, said apple production doesn’t seem to be decreasing in the state any time soon.
“I’ve had some apple farmers in West Virginia tell me that the apple inventory is the largest they’ve seen in their lifetime,” Meyer said.
One stipulation in the 2023 program directed that the apples purchased with government funds were to be donated to other organizations. Once the fruit was harvested, the problem of distributing millions of pounds of apples from West Virginia followed.
According to Meyer, in 2023, Farmlink distributed 13,461,269 pounds of fresh apples across 364 shipments to over 100 other hunger-relief organizations, food banks and pantries throughout the U.S. The apples were sourced from 11 orchards throughout the state, including 75,000 bushels from Orr’s farm.
“The key takeaway from this is that it’s incredibly possible — that a collaboration of the USDA, a state department of agriculture, a group of orchards and a hunger-fighting charity can pull this off,” Meyer said.
Connor Gibbons graduated from the University of West Virginia in 2024 with a degree in journalism. He started this reporting in class and finished it for the Good Fruit Grower audience.
Leave A Comment