Kristen DeMarree, a young grower from Williamson, New York

family background/ Kristen earned a doctorate in physical therapy from Nazareth University then returned to the family farm and is now transitioning to full ownership of the business. She is the daughter of Alison and Tom DeMarree and has two sisters, Nicole and Trena.
age/ 32
hometown/ Williamson, New York
crops/ apples
role/ farm manager, co-owner
business/ Donald DeMarree Fruit Farm

What was one of your earliest memories of being on the farm?
When we were growing up, if my sisters and I had done something bad, my parents would say, “You should go learn something. Go out and pick up some drops, that’ll build some character.”

But I always loved growing up on a farm, because it was nice to be outdoors and to experience what it was like to have parents that owned their own business. And it was especially nice having a mom who taught all three of us girls that we could do anything we wanted, including be our own boss one day.

My mom retired after more than 30 years as a Cornell extension agent for business management and economics, and my dad is the grower.

To me, my mom has always been the business side and analytical side of farming, and my dad has always been the horticulture side of farming. I feel like I’m kind of the perfect blend of both, where I have more of a mind for math and the science behind growing things.

Why did you study physical therapy then return to the farm?
I chose physical therapy because I wanted to help people. I really enjoyed the science of what the medical degree brought.

Right after I graduated, I started working at a research hospital, then I transitioned to travel physical therapy because I really wanted to be able to see different areas in the U.S. and could work part time on the farm when we were really busy during harvest.

Then during the off months, I would go and do physical therapy. At the beginning of COVID I transitioned back to the farm, and I saw all the technology and research that was starting to be developed in agriculture.

The view of what agriculture was when I was a kid growing apples for processing was so different than what my view of agriculture is now growing fresh-market apples. That really drove my transition from doing something in the medical field back to farming.

What are you learning now and looking forward to in the future?
Our farm was predominantly apples for processing, with a whole bunch of standard trees. So, over the past 15 years we’ve been replanting the entire farm to be able to be high density, because we saw where mechanization and harvest automation were going.

Mom and Dad have spent much of their time on the farm preparing it for the future. Now I feel like it’s my job to see what’s out there for mechanization, see what’s out there for technology and data and take the next step into making us more progressive than we already are.

What technology has worked and what are you interested in?
We’ve been using platforms for the past five or six seasons now, which we continue to embrace and buy more of. We’ve also been doing hedging for the past five years.

We’re spending a lot more time investigating what systems can be used to collect data, such as visual scanning tools to collect information on crop load. We’re working with precision irrigation techniques by using sensors for irrigation, soil moisture and fruit sizing. And we’re also doing a lot with tracking all of the jobs on the farm, so we can better understand where we’re spending the most time in labor.

Because labor is becoming such an expensive cost, we’re really trying to figure out ways we can become more efficient with our time. A lot of the available labor-tracking software has allowed us to better evaluate our methods and practices to see what is the most efficient for us to do on the farm.