Okanagan orchards pull out apples as harvest arrives three weeks early
Growers are replanting to cherries and cider varieties, and asking the province to redraw its replant grants.
The excavators are working the benches above Summerland this month, pulling apple blocks that have carried fruit for thirty years, and the harvest that starts three weeks early this season explains why they will not be replaced in kind.
The valley's apple economics have been thin for a decade — packing costs against import prices — but heat is what is closing the argument. The varieties the valley built its reputation on colour poorly and soften fast in the new August; the early harvest rescues the crop's condition at the cost of its storage life, which is the quality the whole export model was built on.
What goes in behind the apples is a map of the growers' bets: cherries, which take the heat and ship by air; cider varieties, which wear their imperfections as character; and in the boldest rows, table grapes. The replant program's grant tables, growers point out, still pay by a variety list drawn up when the problem was fashion rather than temperature.
The ministry says the replant review is underway and will report before winter. The growers, who plant on a thirty-year horizon and are being asked to guess the climate at the far end of it, have taken to calling the exercise by the name one Summerland orchardist gave it at the association meeting: "underwriting the weather of 2055."
