May 28, 2008--Sweet Cherries & Sauerkraut

Is there anything better than a handful of early-summer tree-ripened cherries or, a little later in the year, biting into a sweet peach dripping with juice picked in the orchard?

Well, if for decades you’ve been fortunate enough to drive upstate to Appleton, New York to visit Jim Bittner’s orchard to savor these treats first hand, you had better get an early start this year because as fast as he can he’s cutting down his fruit trees. So far 25 acres of sweet cheery and 20 acres of peach trees have been turned into firewood. Some of them were up to 30 years old. (See linked article from the NY Times.)

It’s not that he’s giving up, retiring, or selling out to developers. He plans to replace his trees with berry bushes for use in pies. It’s just that with the Immigration people cracking down on farm workers he can no longer depend on being able to hire enough to hand gather his fruit. So he’s feeling forced to turn to crops that can be harvested by machine.

Others, with the encouragement of sauerkraut producers are turning dairy farms into cabbage fields. It costs so much to automate the milking of cows (in many upstate places there aren’t enough workers to hand milk them), that planting cabbage will allow some farmers to remain viable. But many are resisting this transition to new kinds of cash crops as that will also cause an unacceptable transition in their traditional way of life.

None of this comes as news to farmers. Since the end of the Civil War there has been disruption and turmoil across the land among small farmers. The changes that were inevitable as the result of mechanization were accelerated during the widespread droughts of the 1930s, the over planting of certain crops that sapped the soil of its fertility, the Great Depression that was experienced most severely in rural America, and the beginning of federal farm subsidies that continue to this day and which favor corporate landholders.

These larger historical trends that have remade much of the life and culture of America, those macro forces and the newer ones that affect who is available to carry out farm work, they mean that before too long all of Jim Bittner’s fruit tree will be gone and it will be impossible to describe to our children and grandchildren what an incandescent joy it was to bite into a fresh peach and how wonderful to have its succulent juices run down from our mouths and onto our chins. Video games just don’t cut it in the same way on a hot summer’s day.