ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
It's near the end of apple-picking season, and in the big, apple-growing state of Michigan, the harvest is expected to be huge for the third year in a row - a whopping 29 million bushels, about 3 million more than usual. But bigger is not always better, and growers are working on ways to slow down the harvest. Interlochen Public Radio's Ellie Katz has more.
ELLIE KATZ, BYLINE: Cherry Bay Orchards, despite the name, grows hundreds of acres of apples. And in the pitch dark at 5:30 a.m., orchard manager Emma Grant is rummaging around the office, looking for some special utensils.
EMMA GRANT: We have this whole box of stuff that came, and I put it in this building, and it is not there.
KATZ: So the search continues in a big barn, full of supplies.
GRANT: Here they are.
KATZ: Grant finds the special stirrers she needs to mix up something she's spraying on the apple trees today.
GRANT: This product is an ethylene receptor blocker. I think I said that right.
KATZ: Ethylene is the gas that apples and many fruits release as part of the ripening process. But if some of that ethylene is blocked, it slows down ripening.
GRANT: We've never used this before, but we are spraying this in hopes that we can delay the maturity of the premier Honeycrisp. They can get redder on the tree, and then by the time we get through our other apples and pick them, they're still at a ripeness level that's ideal for storage.
KATZ: Grant wanted to try something new because things were rough last year. Growers across the country grew near-record numbers of apples - roughly 11 billion pounds, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Chris Gerlach says that overabundance of apples drove down prices and clogged up supply chains.
CHRIS GERLACH: We've added about 30 - 35,000 apple acres over the last five years.
KATZ: Gerlach tracks analytics for the U.S. Apple Association, a trade association for the apple industry. He says many farmers had to leave perfectly good fruit on the tree or donate it. In addition to a lot more apple trees being planted in the U.S. in recent years, the way apples are grown has also changed. Nikki Rothwell is a fruit researcher with Michigan State University Extension.
NIKKI ROTHWELL: If you look back at the way we used to grow trees - those big, old trees, you'd climb ladders to do the picking.
KATZ: Now trees are grown close together on long trellises. The result almost looks like walls of fruit.
ROTHWELL: And they're doing exactly what the economic yield models predicted. We're growing a lot more really high-quality fruit.
KATZ: This may be the new normal, but it has its wrinkles. Some growers lost money because last year's high harvests drove the values of certain apple varieties so low. That's on top of the costs of labor, packing and storing the apples, and the commission for salespeople. Here's Chris Gerlach again.
GERLACH: Typically, at the end of the season, these apple-growers will take the prices their apples were sold for minus these costs of services, and they'll get a check in the mail. Well, this year, lots of growers were getting bills in the mail because the value of their apples was less than the cost of services.
KATZ: Although it's shaping up to be a big year again, estimates from USApple and the USDA predict there won't be nearly as many apples as last year.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY WHIRRING)
KATZ: Emma Grant at Cherry Bay Orchard says she still expects a good year. She sprayed all those premier Honeycrisp apples with ethylene blocker. And she says it worked. It bought a little more time for some of the apples to turn redder, without overmaturing.
GRANT: This is the third year in a row that we've had a big apple crop in Michigan. So if it continues down this way, things like this are just going to have to become commonplace.
KATZ: Now, she says, they'll have to wait and see how those apples hold up in storage, until they're sold to people looking for fruit. For NPR News, I'm Ellie Katz in Interlochen, Michigan.
(SOUNDBITE OF RENAO SONG, "LIFELINE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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