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November 8, 2004

Tales from the orchard | Turner farmer Harry Ricker on the intricacies of the apple business, plus the brave new world of disc golf, corn mazes and bus tours

By Michaela Cavallaro
The main business at Ricker Hill Orchards is apples. And this year, we had ideal growing conditions with all the rain we had. When we got to harvest season, it was dry and warm with cool nights ˆ— they're the nicest apples we've ever grown. They're probably two sizes bigger than normal.

The trees that didn't get injured in last year's winter weather grew big, beautiful apples. The ones that did get injured just died. The problem is that they're spread here and there throughout the orchard, which makes the orchard more inefficient. But 85% of our trees had really good growing conditions, and their roots did not get injured. The federal government has created something to help apple growers in disaster years, but it's set up so big growers don't qualify. More often than not, we don't qualify. They say we're not a family farm because we sell more than $2.5 million of product a year.

This year I think we should have an average year overall, and an average year unfortunately can be very close to break even. We picked an average crop with a small number of pickers ˆ— it took a lot less apples to fill a box, so we were able to do with a lot less pickers. It's got to be a really good year for us to make money.

My family started farming here in 1803. By the late 1800s, we had the largest production of apples in the state. It was mostly an export business ˆ— like now, there weren't a lot of people in Maine. We shipped a lot of apples to South Africa, the Caribbean and Europe in wood barrels in wooden ships.

Then the dollar got really strong under President Reagan. People who tried to use pounds in England needed more of them to buy our apples, so it became very hard for us to compete. The whole industry suffered.

In meantime, back in the 1920s, we had started delivering apples into Lewiston-Auburn and Portland. We started with a number of the small grocery stores. In the 70s we started doing more store-door delivery with a truck on a regular run. By the 1980s, we were selling primarily to Maine and New Hampshire as a necessity to cover the loss of market overseas. Last year, we sent two containers of apples in export, which is nothing ˆ— a couple thousand bushels.

In 1992 and 1996, we had very large crops. Those are the years we lost more money ˆ— we spent a huge amount of money to harvest them, and we ended up throwing a bunch away. We could see that we couldn't survive that. So we started looking to shrink our apple crop and do something else to support our debt.

In 1997, we planted both some wild ginseng and some cranberries. Wild ginseng was an export product that was marketed in Asia. For cranberries, there is no market for export, but they had 24 years of increased prices, and they were quite profitable. I was looking for a crop that could keep us in agriculture, make use of our land and diversify from apples.

Ginseng turned out to be a no-go ˆ— it just didn't work for us. Cranberries, on the other hand, have come along nicely. But right after we planted them the market fell from 85 cents to just over eight cents a pound ˆ— tenfold. Timing is everything in business, and mine was very poor in the cranberry business.

But we stuck with it. We've just finished this year's cranberry harvest. That was a good harvest, probably the best one we've had both volume-wise and quality-wise. As production has come up, our sales have, too. In Massachusetts, they're getting 32-42 cents per pound, they're going to be up to about half the price it was when we started growing them.

We planted the variety of cranberries that ripens the latest so they wouldn't conflict with the harvest of our Macintosh varieties. And it turns out that late, big red cranberries develop more sugar ˆ— the product sells itself. We don't try to get stores to carry just our cranberries; we'd much rather that they slot our cranberries next to anybody else's so consumers can see the premium they're getting with our product.

We're making a variable-cost profit ˆ— we're not making enough yet to pay all the debt we incurred for the cranberries, but we're paying some of it, which is encouraging. Last year we were sold out through Thanksgiving, but the market is still pretty good through Christmas. Each year I'm growing a little more than I did last year; hopefully I'm eventually going to grow twice the amount I do now on the same acreage. The price is the only problem, but such is life in agriculture. I wouldn't be in this business if I wasn't an optimist.

Another way we've tried to diversify is that we made a special plan to push for agri-tourism, so we built an ag-tourism center at our farm stand. We were hoping to get a decent market from our area, but we knew that to justify the investment and create a center for profits to support the farm, it needed to be more than that. So we designed it to appeal to the motor coach market.

That really hadn't been done in Maine; in Vermont, though, it's a huge business. A friend has a cider mill in Vermont that does as many as 30 tour buses a day. My wife, Nancy, and I went out to see him to learn more about what he does. Afterwards, we talked to a bunch of tour operators and we designed our operations to fit what the tour operators were doing as well as possible.

So when a tour bus comes in, either my nephew or I will step on. We'll give the background on our family, they'll get a look at the beautiful vistas from the top of Ricker Hill, we drive by the cranberry bogs, then we stop at the farmstand. We've got handicapped-accessible bathrooms, a kind of museum with old farm tools and a bakery and gift shop where we try to get the profit to pay for all this stuff.

We had two buses the first year, 12 last year and we'll do somewhere near 30 this year. It's growing ˆ— but 30 in a season is not the same as 30 in a day. We've got to change the traffic patterns in order to subsidize the normal Maine customers, who come for the vistas and to pick apples.

We've also diversified into a disc golf course. It turned out to be a really good move, because it brings in 15-25 people a day and 50 or more on the weekend to supplement the regular crowd we have for the farmstand.

We've also got a miniature golf course and a pedal tractor track for kids to race around on. This year we added a farm obstacle course. The corn maze has grown every year since we've had it ˆ— people love them. And the longer they're lost in them, the more they like it. A few years ago we put in a few thousand rainbow trout ˆ— we grew our own trout from fingerlings so people can feed the trout or they can fish for them.

We've made the farm a day destination. People can get some education ˆ— we've got videos of how we pack apples, how we make cider ˆ— they can get entertainment and they can buy some good apples. It's been quite a process to put all this stuff together, but it seems to be working well. As the economics change and you have to survive, it's amazing what you can do, and what different directions you can go in to make that happen.

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