This incredibly informative article on the apple industry was sent along by a friend I acquired through not far from the tree, Suzanne Long. You can read the full article here.

All our apples will be Red

Even when every other industry’s future can appear murky, one thing remains clear: The world’s gotta eat. The question is, what are you going to put on your plate?

SARAH ELTON

From Friday’s Globe and Mail

October 25, 2007 at 7:00 AM EST

Howard Staff was on his way to the Ming Dynasty Tombs when he saw his apple orchard’s future.

It was 1987, and Staff, a Niagara grape and apple grower, was in China consulting on how to improve local wine production. During a break for a bit of sightseeing, he stumbled upon an enormous apple orchard that had been planted during the Cultural Revolution. “It was just huge—500 acres, just coming into production,” he says. Nearby, there were even larger orchards. “Thousands and thousands of acres of apples,” Staff says. “When you see that kind of thing, you think, ‘Oh my goodness!’”

Staff and his colleagues abandoned their trip to the Ming Tombs and instead sought out the orchard’s foreman to learn more. It emerged that the young orchard didn’t yet have what Staff calls a “good apple”—a nice, round, sizable, eating fruit—but it was capable of producing massive amounts of juice. The trees weren’t the advanced varieties Staff had back in Canada, and the technology was antiquated: Labourers were spraying pesticide by hand, chemicals slopping down their backs. But Staff knew then and there that his time in the apple business was limited. “By the sheer volume, they were going to snow us under,” he says. “Whether they were using old technology or not, they had enough people to make it work.

“I told the fellows, ‘We’re in trouble.’”

After a decade of rapid growth, China makes most of the world’s concentrated apple juice.

Two decades after Staff’s visit to China, Ontario apples bound for processing are worth less than they were in the 1980s. While cheaper Chinese apples have invaded the market—just as Staff foresaw—the cost of production in Ontario has risen. The resulting squeeze has forced some farmers to tear out their apple trees in favour of other crops. Two other apple-growing provinces, British Columbia and Quebec, enjoy slightly stronger markets, but farmers there are also finding the apple business to be an ever tougher struggle.

Tags: apple industry, apple juice, Ontario apples