The Hidden Labor Behind Apple Picking
Apple picking is a beloved fall tradition for many Americans. But just why do we love it so much — and what does it say about the ways we value food and farm labor in the U.S.?
By: Hannah Richter
TRANSCRIPT:
[Hannah Richter 00:00] When I moved back to the East Coast after four years of school, I couldn’t wait for Fall to begin. The trees always look painted in glorious reds and yellows. The air is perfectly crisp. And it feels like you hear everyone — families, couples, friends — talking about going to pick apples.
So that’s what I did with my friend Molly. We met up at Honey Pot Hill Orchards, a family-run farm a few miles from where she grew up.
[Molly Jones in field 00:25] Usually, I come on the weekends and it’s super crowded. So I just go to the farm store to buy some apples and apple cider doughnuts. It can get pretty busy here. The orchards are big, though.
[Hannah Richter 00:37] Though it wasn’t packed on a Wednesday, there were definitely other people making an afternoon out of apple picking. We could hear shouts from a friendly volleyball game, an older couple murmuring about the best varieties to bring home with them, and a mother trailing her toddling son through rows of towering trees.
[Hannah Richter 00:57] Molly’s been apple picking enough times to perfect her methods.
[Molly Jones in field 01:01] Well, I was told as a kid that, you know, how red the apple is isn’t necessarily a good indicator of ripeness, it’s, you gotta look at the spots on the apple and whether or not they’re yellow or green. And if there’s green spots, it’s unripe and you should leave it on the branch to ripen.
[Hannah Richter 01:17] We walked past rows of Red Delicious, MacIntosh, and Gala, before finding a cluster of trees nearly sagging with the weight of Cortland apples. Molly stepped between the branches to pick her favorites.
[Molly Jones in field 01:29] These ones are so ripe they keep falling as I’m trying to pick them.
[Hannah Richter 01:38] And, like most people do when you go to the apple orchard, you’ve just gotta try a bite right there.
[Molly Jones in field 01:44] Oh, it was a Cortland apple. So it’s a little better for baking than eating. It was sweet and a little tart but it was also a little too soft for me.
[Hannah Richter 01:52] With our bounty of apples secured, I headed over to the farm store to speak with fourth-generation owner Chelcie Martin. She said Honey Pot Hill has been doing pick-your-own since 1975. That’s nearly 50 years.
[Chelcie Martin 02:04] Pick your own started as a way for people to pay less for more apples.
[Hannah Richter 02:08] Back when her grandfather owned the farm, pick-your own apples cut out the middleman.
[Chelcie Martin 02:12] So in the 70s, traditionally, if you’re a commercial orchard, you sell your apples to a packing house, and they pack them for you. And then those apples go to a grocery store, or wherever they’re being sold. And the packing house was like, sorry, you’re too small. We don’t want your apples anymore. And my grandfather was like, Okay, well, we have to find another way to sell our apples, so he started the pick-your-own operation.
[Hannah Richter 02:32] But what originated as a clever workaround for a small family farm has ballooned into a small but thriving industry in the Northeast. On a sunny September or October weekend, Honey Pot Hill can have thousands of visitors eager to venture into their orchards.
[Chelcie Martin 02:46] I mean, if you think about it, pick-your-own is a pretty solid business model. People are paying you to pick your fruit. Like, we get people from other countries that are like: ‘What — you want me to pay you to pick? That that’s your job, that’s why you have the farm, you pick the fruit.’ Hahaha. It’s rational, if you think about it.
[Hannah Richter 03:02] At $25 for a small bag and $38 for a large one, picking your own apples at Honey Pot Hill is way pricier than going to the grocery store. It’s also more expensive than buying Honey Pot Hill’s apples without doing the work yourself. At the farm store, they sell the same apples you can pick for just over half as much money. Small family farms can charge these high prices because when you go to pick apples, that’s not really all you’re doing.
[Chelcie Martin 03:26] It’s evolved into this experience where people are willing to pay whatever because they’re just here to like walk around, get some doughnuts, like see some pretty property and have a few apples and go home.
[Hannah Richter 03:36] When I go to pick my own apples, I’m expecting a whole lot more than just the fruit. I’m hoping to wander through corn mazes, go on hayrides, and pick up a treat at the farm store. Small family farms know this, and they’re building a growing industry known as agritourism.
[Chelcie Martin 03:50] Food is much more readily available than it was 100 years ago. People are not as willing to pay for food as they are for an experience. So like, that’s the shift that you have to make if you want to stay viable, make enough money to survive.
[Hannah Richter 04:04] In the U.S., farms are growing and consolidating, and many small family farms are going out of business. Today, they make up only a quarter of all American farms, down from about half in 1990. Adapting to provide people a seasonal experience is just one way to try to stay afloat.
[Chelcie Martin 04:20] This is one of those places, it’s not like Disney World, but it’s like, you know, one of those places that like, is supposed to espouse that feeling, like people are paying more for feeling than they are paying for an actual product. Cause they’re willing to pay to feel better.
[Hannah Richter 04:35] Regardless of why we’re paying, at the end of the day, we’re shelling out money to do something we normally can’t get done fast enough: work. But pick your own apples represents only a fraction of America’s apple industry. The U.S. is the world’s 2nd largest apple producer after China, and the labor that goes into the apples we find shiny and piled up in pyramids in our grocery stores is much more hidden.
Yuki Kato is an urban sociologist at Georgetown University, and she’s studied food justice and culture for over 15 years. She thinks apple picking provides a unique look into the way Americans value the true cost of food and the labor behind it.
[Yuki Kato 05:09] You know, what appeals to us about picking our own food really is more about the fact that we don’t have to. Right, the group of people who tend to fantasize or to, you know, have these kind of a warm feelings about things like apple picking are people who do not think of that as a labor, but think of that as a leisure.
[Hannah Richter 05:28] In other words, we enjoy apple picking because it’s something we can do for fun on a Saturday, and then not think about again for another year. But in reality, farm work is far from a leisure activity. There are millions of farm workers in America, and nearly half of them are undocumented. These workers are often underpaid and work more hours than is legal. In 2020, farm workers earned less than two-thirds of what workers in production jobs outside of agriculture did.
[Yuki Kato 05:52] I do think the traveling side effect of that is that we may also then collectively devalue farm work as a labor. Because it’s something that we voluntarily do, and pay to do, right, for fun on the weekend. If that is the case, then I think we also do not take farm labor seriously, we do not value farm labor as something that is as exploitative and as harsh as it is in reality.
[Yuki Kato 06:22] And it’s not too different from for example, maybe, taking cooking for granted, right? When, when it comes to home cooking, and we expect mothers and women to do this out of love, not because, you know, we actually value that as a labor, except when we go to a restaurant, we pay for that labor.
[Hannah Richter 06:42] And speaking of paying, at a pick-your-own farm like Honey Pot Hill, you shell out far more money for apples than you do on a typical basis. When the numbers shake out, my haul was almost four times as expensive as it would’ve been at the supermarket. Being able to afford fresher or local produce is a privilege, especially when the gap between family farm and supermarket prices is so extreme.
[Yuki Kato 07:03] And I think it’s also, you know, not too dissimilar to many of us willing to pay more at the farmers market, because we feel that it’s either a better product or product that we’re willing to pay more for. And a lot of that really is a reflection of who can afford to feel good in the way that we consume certain kind of food items.
[Hannah Richter 07:25] So when you can afford to pay more for produce, you’re also generally paying more because of the labor that went into growing and picking it. The cheaper stuff we find at the grocery store is so cheap for a reason — the work behind it isn’t fairly compensated. But people aren’t necessarily willing or able to pay the high costs that small farms need to pay their workers fairly. So to earn enough money, these farms often need to create an experience.
[Yuki Kato 07:48] You know, what does it mean that the farmers are now basically running entertainment businesses, hahaha, you know, of some sort. Like that’s maybe a good kind of diversifying, you know, but at the same time I do wonder: Is it, is it really going to change the way we think of a farm too, like, when we think about farm, do we think about entertainment? You know, destination? Like that’s a very different way to think about farming.
[Hannah Richter 08:12] The idea of agritourism is playing out in small ways all around us. We love to buy in to the idea of an idyllic, small-town farm where people in overalls tend to their chickens. Marketers know this, and they plaster images of imaginary small farms all over grocery store items from eggs to potato chips.
But the reality, according to the USDA, is that small family farms like Honey Pot Hill produce only about a fifth of our food. So how did this disconnect happen?
[Yuki Kato 08:39] I think there are several things that’s happened, right. And so at least historically, in the US, the increasing distances between the locale of production and locale of consumption has been so disconnected, right.
[Yuki Kato 08:51] Um, and then it also, I think it’s very much increasingly divided by class and immigration statuses in terms of who are in those industries as laborers or even as farm owners. And so there is an increasing divide between group of people who are familiar with the reality of farming industry. And then there are a group of us who just get to really blissfully unaware of, of those realities.
[Yuki Kato 09:19] And I think those ways in which, you know, labor has always been erased from the way we think about farm probably has always been there. It just that the, the modern-day development of this kind of a massive global food system made it even easier for us to not think about it.
[Hannah Richter 09:39] But there are still some hold outs that view farming as a local endeavor, not a big business. Honey Pot Hill Orchards is one of them.
[Chelcie Martin 09:47] I’m the one who’s putting my neck out for my, whatever growing practices we are doing. Like my product is not being shipped anywhere. It’s all being sold right here. Like I have to look at it all the time. So like, we’re not a conglomerate who buys things and sells them to those people over there. And I think that that’s like a really important thing that is less and less available as time goes on.
[Hannah Richter 10:11] Even if small farms aren’t representative of our food system anymore, that doesn’t make agritourism any less compelling. But it’s important to know the causes underlying this growing industry, and the elements of our food system it can hide.
[Yuki Kato 10:23] You know, if people want to go pick apples, I don’t think, I, I wouldn’t say don’t go pick apples. But at least maybe pause and to ask: Who else works here? Um, and you know, why do I like to go to this place? I think even just being reflexive about it is important.
[Hannah Richter 10:43] So, Yuki says, the next time you head out to enjoy the fall colors and sweet treats at an apple orchard, just take a minute to think about the people who pick apples the other 99% of the time. And what their labor is really worth.
