Alternative fruits, nuts
How ready is Idaho for alternative crops?
by Marlene Fritz
In Idaho’s sparsely populated, wide open, and windswept Owyhee County, Marshall Becker put two and two together. His brothers in northern California were producing walnut crops that cleared a lot more profit than Becker’s grains and alfalfa ever could. Right there in Grandview, backyard walnut trees produced gunnysacks of nuts.
Becker called his brothers and nurseries they bought from, and soon planted 50-plus walnut and 20 almond trees. He selected three of the most generously bearing varieties of each type and watched closely this spring for signs that they had survived the single-digit nights of their first—and most critical—winter. They had.
With higher energy costs squeezing profits, Becker says he’s in the market for an alternative crop because “growing grain and alfalfa doesn’t work as well as it did for our fathers. We need to get into some higher cash crops.” And, unlike grapes and cherries—which demand increasingly precarious supplies of farm labor—nuts are literally shaken out of their trees, windrowed, scooped up, and hauled away for processing.
Search for best-tasting huckleberries
At northern Idaho’s Sandpoint Research and Extension Center, hardly a day goes by when superintendent/horticulturist Dan Barney doesn’t get two or three e-mails from people who want to grow domesticated huckleberries. With accessible wild stands of western huckleberries suffering from overharvesting and with consumer demand swelling unabated, northern Idahoans see opportunities for income that they’d very much like to capture.
If huckleberries are simply stripped from wild plants and shipped to markets, Barney says Idahoans will realize very little economic benefit. “We want a reliable supply of high-quality fruit so we can develop a processing industry and keep economic benefits here.”
That’s why, for the past 12 years, Barney has been collecting, crossing, and growing wild huckleberries from all over the Northern Hemisphere.
His goal: To find plants that will produce the best-tasting, most nutritious, and most bountiful fruit under cultivation. Some will delight diners’ palates in the nation’s five-star restaurants while others—rich in antioxidants and anthocyanins—should delight manufacturers and consumers of healthful “neutraceuticals.” Beyond culinary uses is a dizzying array of huckleberry-scented lotions, soaps, shampoos, and other products.
Evaluations in 3 states
This year, of 97 selections that Barney says “show real promise,” 13 are being evaluated by cooperating growers in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. If any become commercial varieties in the next 8 years, Barney will be within the 20-year time span for first-cross-to-final-release new variety development.
Will Idaho subdivisions grow persimmons, figs, Asian pears?
At the university’s Southwest Idaho Research and Extension Center, Parma, fruit crop physiologist Essie Fallahi has evaluated alternative tree fruits for 7 years and table grapes for 17. “As our U.S. population gets more diverse, we will consume different types of fruit,” he predicts.
Fallahi’s intensive table grapes efforts prompted an Idaho Table Grape Association and an industry that’s now 43 producers strong. Roughly 235 acres are in production, another 600 acres to come soon.
This fall, an initial shipment of about 1 million pounds is anticipated for Taiwan, which association president Tom Elias expects to become the state’s biggest export market. Elias says Treasure Valley vines are yielding between 12 and 15 tons per acre. But table-grape production is “extremely labor-intensive,” he cautions: growers have to “live in your vineyards” to get top yields.
Fallahi expects interest in growing alternative fruit to come from the Treasure Valley’s 5- to 15-acre “ranchette” owners. Developers seek his advice on adding the cachet of exotic fruit production—grapes, persimmons, Asian pears, and even figs—to new high-end subdivisions.
Idaho White peaches for Taiwan
Even established orchardists like John Williamson of Williamson Orchards and Vineyards have found white peaches and pluots rewarding. Now in production eight years, Williamson’s white peaches go to an appreciative buyer in Taiwan.
“You have to raise a high-quality, large fruit,” says the Caldwell grower. “If you can do that, I think there’s a good market.” His pluots aren’t consistently profitable, but because they’re something that not everybody has, “you can do okay with them.”
With changes in the fruit industry favoring huge growers who can supply major chains, staying in business is “getting to be more of a challenge,” Williamson says. And with developers breathing heavily at fruit growers’ gates, “you ask why knock yourself on the head when somebody will pay you $20,000 to $25,000 an acre and you can make more than you can farming?”
Diversifying is one way Idaho fruit growers can help keep their accounting ledgers in the black. “One year you might have a disaster in one thing but something else will come through for you. Diversifying stabilizes your situation,” says Williamson.
In his research orchard, Fallahi’s Snow Giant and Yukon King white peaches have done “wonderfully well,” as have Arctic Jay white-fleshed nectarines. This spring, with funding from the Idaho Stone Fruit Committee, he planted 52 new “cream of the crop” peaches and nectarines. Several Asian pears, persimmons, and quince show promise, too, as do walnuts and almonds.
“I’m not saying we don’t have the potential for frost; we do,” says Fallahi. “But we have the same risk with other crops—and global warming is beyond theory anymore.”
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