Apple harvest time: Wild swings in weather, slow spring start impact production

The fruits of the Simon family’s labors are on display for all to see at the Simon’s Apple Orchard store in Mt. Pleasant Township.

The sweet smell of freshly harvested apples permeates the air as bags of apples are made ready for sale.

“It was decent. Not a full crop … maybe 60% to 70%. We lost some ’cause of the frost” in the spring, said Joe Simon, who operates the orchard along Route 819.

Apple crops represent a multimillion-dollar industry in Pennsylvania. The state ranks fourth in the country for acreage devoted to apple growing and fourth in terms of production, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars for farmers.

Harvest season is in full bloom, as September and October are the peak months.

Simon’s middling 2023 season is on par with orchards across the state, said Andrew Schwalm, president of the state Horticultural Association. The 600-member trade association consists mostly of apple growers.

“The apples harvested are of good quality and good flavor,” Schwalm said.

The drier weather in the summer helped to develop “the bright red shine … and beautiful red color” that consumers want in an apple, said Tom Ford, a commercial horticultural educator at Penn State Extension in Ebensburg.

Ford’s territory includes the Chestnut Ridge orchards where 500 acres of apples are being harvested.

At Adam Voll’s family-owned Soergel Orchards in Franklin Park, they are harvesting “a good-sized apple” on 25 acres where more than 20 varieties of apples are grown.

The growing season started off slowly because of a late frost that was followed by a dry summer, Voll said. Too much rain creates conditions for fungus, but a lack of rain hampers growth, he said.

“You kind of need a happy medium,” Voll said.

Some growers were harmed by hailstorms that damaged trees in the spring. Growers in other regions, such as apple producers in Adams County, were hurt by heavy rains, said Schwalm, who works a 130-acre orchard in Berks County.

“There’s a lot of factors” impacting production, Schwalm said. “The massive swings in weather earlier this year, from droughts to rainstorms,” did not help, he said.

And it was unusual to be harvesting apples in September in 90-degree weather, he said.

Over the years, Pennsylvania has had a healthy apple industry. The state boasted 17,500 acres of apple trees in 2022 — fourth most in the country but down from 19,500 acres in 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agriculture Statistics Service. Washington, not surprisingly, is the leader with 173,000 acres of apple trees, followed by New York and Michigan.

“We have a lot of the attributes for a good fruit-growing region,” with hills, good weather in the spring and cooler weather in the fall, Schwalm said.

Those ridgetops give growers some protection from late-spring frost that can devastate the apple tree blooms in the lower elevations where there is less air flow, Ford said.

Another reason why so much acreage is devoted to apples and other fruit is that the soil is not as conducive to other crops, such as corn, Schwalm said.

With that much acreage devoted to apples, Pennsylvania produced 412 million pounds of apples last year, down from the 557 million pounds produced in 2021.

The good news for Pennsylvania apple growers is that the value of their production has risen from $69.7 million in 2020 to $74.69 million last year, according to the agriculture statistics service.

Simon has 503 apple trees spread over 11 acres, and he planted 250 more this spring. He adds value to his harvest by using some of the apples to produce fresh cider for his store and others to make apple butter.

“It’s something that people want when they go to a farm store,” Simon said. “There’s nothing that goes to waste.”