(bright upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to Farm Connections.

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

On this episode of "Farm Connections," we visit with Jay Clark and experience the Apples R Us Orchard and Distillery in Rochester, and the University of Minnesota extension provides us with another best practices, All here today on "Farm Connections."

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(apple trees rustling softly) - Welcome to "Farm Connections."

We're in rural Olmstead County at Apples R Us Orchard and Distillery, and Jay Clark, the owner, is here to tell us all about it.

Jay, welcome to "Farm Connections."

- Thank you.

- And thanks for having us in your beautiful orchard.

This is amazing.

- And you can see it.

We're standing in it!

- This is a lot of work!

- Yes, it is, it is.

My wife and I have really challenged with this, but it's been fun.

- You seem like a guy that likes challenges.

- I love challenges.

I like to create things.

My wife and I, 14 years dated, 10 years married.

She's been an integral part of the orchard and she is the owner of the orchard and distillery now.

At my age, at 70, I've stepped back as an advisor, helper, and you know, she's the breadwinner.

It's her project.

- Well, it's nice to share, isn't it?

- I love it.

She does a wonderful job.

She's a perfectionist at everything she does, so it really makes it easy to work with her.

- Well, we've had a very challenging growing season.

It's been dry this year.

There's people that have had a huge crop loss, and yet behind us and all around us we see a bountiful harvest.

What's the secret?

- First of all, we have irrigation, okay?

We have a 220-gallon-a-minute drip irrigation system that will operate all the orchards at once if we need to.

That is the key.

Like this orchard, we planted 1,000 new trees this year.

We're changing varieties in this orchard and moving away from the variety that you see behind us.

We'll keep that variety, but we're gonna have more Honeycrisp in this orchard.

Those trees would've been dead this year if we didn't have irrigation.

I mean, we were irrigating every week, 'cause the route structure is real shallow in the trees.

- It's a very nice site.

So you've put some design and some engineering into the irrigation, but also how you place them.

Is the placement aligning with the sun or the wind or anything like that?

- We try to keep our trees north/south, so as the sun moves from the east to the west, both sides of the tree get an equal dose.

- And it looks like you do some extensive pruning?

- Yes, very heavy pruning.

We didn't for a while, and this year we decided we're gonna take...

The key is to take off all the big wood on the tree.

Unless you cut the tree off down below, it won't die.

And it has a tendency to sprout new branches wherever you do a cut, especially if you do an angle cut.

Like instead of a blunt cut, you do a 45-degree angle cut, it'll shoot a new branch off the tip of that angle cut.

- I also noticed there's some very small apples that look like crabapples.

What'd you do, forget to water those?

- Those are our pollinators.

We planted three different varieties of pollinators, Mount Blanc, Mount Evereste, and Whitney, and they all mature or go into bloom at different times based on how fickle the Pazazz, the Honeycrisp, and our others are.

We make sure we plant 'em in the orchard and we have them on the west sides of the orchard so that the wind can help us with pollination.

Fortunately, the other orchard in town, Sekapp Orchard, has bees here and has had 'em here since we started, and that allows us great pollination.

I mean, they're right by our pond.

That's what the bees need is water and plenty of pollen, you know?

And so he gets a good harvest of honey, and then we actually buy the honey he spins back from him and use it in one of our distillery products.

- Well, you certainly added value to the land and you take care of it.

I mean, it's not eroding.

It's easy to move through here and see that you've done a lot of good things, including the pruning, but also the trellises.

Why the trellises?

- The trellises are, this technique of growing was developed in Israel, 'cause they didn't have much land.

They grow oranges, everything that way.

Grapefruit, everything is high-density trellis growing systems.

It's the wave of the future.

You can get up to 1,400 trees per acre.

Trees give you about a bushel per tree, so you can get much more yield out of a controlled environment.

And to mention, it's so easy to spray.

You know, when you have a big bushy tree, all the bugs are on the inside of the tree and you just gotta have a powerful sprayer and the insecticides and whatever have to go into this tree or you don't get 'em.

Here when I spray with a tower sprayer, I actually spray through the rows and catch the next row.

I still go up and down every row, but I cut my chemicals back immensely.

We're almost organic on our fungicides.

We use copper, basically, which most of the organic growers use copper.

We use that most of the season.

Near the end of the season, I have to switch it up, but you know, I stay that way.

And then insecticides, we just vary, but we don't need much, because we don't have other orchards around, which carry problems, and it's so easy to paint the trees, and I use a lot of surfactant, you know, which makes the fungicide insecticide, plus the the leaf fertilizers we do stick to the trees.

So it's taken me a while to figure this out, 'cause I wasn't grown up on a farm.

- And when you get the trellis system and you're actually helping support that tree so you can go through the rows for work, but also it supports it when it has a lot of apples on it.

- Yeah, we've had some that weren't tied at the top that have snapped off this year 'cause of the fruit load.

That's why we're taking the time to go through and tie all our trees this year while we're picking.

- And of course, it isn't always balmy 90 degrees or 80 degrees.

Sometimes it's like today in the 40s.

But what happens in Minnesota winter?

- The trees go to sleep.

We summer prune.

Everybody else winter prunes.

We just can't get out here in the winter and prune, and I really don't wanna be out here in the winter and prune at 70 years old.

(laughs) I wanna be in Florida.

So basically we summer prune and we sterilize our pruning cuts with peroxide.

I put peroxide in my spray, and that is a disinfectant, and so that basically sterilizes every cut we make.

- And I'm guessing the trellis system with tying the trees helps with snow load.

- Correct.

Well, yeah, you just don't get much.

Most of the trees will drop their leaves, okay?

So we don't really... You know, you come back out here in December and there isn't a leaf on a tree.

You know, maybe a few, but generally speaking, the snow out here gets a foot deep.

You just can't trudge up and down these hills and prune in the winter.

- What's the favorite part of owning and operating an orchard?

- Ooh, that's a good question.

I think harvest I like the best, 'cause you see what your fruit of your labor was for a whole year.

I enjoy marketing our product with the school districts and grocery stores like Hy-Vee or Fareway.

And because we have sophisticated processing equipment in our packing operations, we are USDA-approved, Minnesota Department of Health approved to wash our apples, sort our apples, and sell 'em ready-to-eat in the grocery stores.

That opened up a whole new avenue of marketing for me.

So I get to do the marketing.

My wife is the distiller and the operations manager and my boss, and I do the marketing.

I do the sales and marketing.

- Well, thanks for getting a good, wonderful fruit product into our schools, because it sure beats a snack out of a bag.

- Yeah, the Austin public schools are gobbling 'em up.

The took 'em to the middle schools and the nutrition department called me yesterday panicking.

They're out and they need enough to get the true MEA next week, and so I'm gonna haul down, I don't know, as many as I get in my dang car.

I've been hauling 'em 10 cases every two days or three days.

- Jay, for every good product that a student or a person consumes it displaces some salt, some fat, and some other processed foods.

- No question, no question.

I had a young kid from Austin.

His folks were here the other day and he goes to elementary school in Austin.

And I said, "So how do you like the apples?"

"Oh," he says, "They're great!

They got rid of those green ones and we got (laughs) some red ones in.

They're just great!"

And I said, "Well, those came from us."

They did, you know, and I was like, okay.

I mean, just see the glee in his eyes, you know?

And his parents are just laughing.

- Well, you gave me a sample.

You picked one off the tree, you polished it up.

It was shiny, the skin was really great texture.

And then as I ate it, it went through something you called profiles.

Can you tell me about tasting apples and what we should be looking for?

- Well, most everything we grow is an offshoot of a Honeycrisp, okay?

First Kiss is a half Honeycrisp, SweeTango is a half of a Honeycrisp mixed with Zestar!

This is a half of a Honeycrisp mixed with an unknown cultivar.

You know, nobody knows.

It was developed by Doug Shefelbine, a grower down in Holmen, Wisconsin.

And he's like 78 years old now, and that's all he did was make trees and varieties like the U did.

He worked with the U.

And so this is the only one that's not a U apple right here, but the profile is there.

You go from sweet to sweeter to sweetest, right?

Like these new apples that we're just gonna plant in our new orchard this year are all university apples.

We're gonna be planting Triumph and Kudos.

And Kudos is a second-generation SweeTango, so it is the next step of... SweeTango was Honeycrisp and Zestar!

combined.

Kudos is Honeycrisp and Zestar!, but it's the next generation, and from what all the reports are on it, it's still much sweeter.

There's where your profiles come.

Sweetness, sweetness.

Apples from Washington are not grown in the same type of soils as we grow here.

Honeycrisp originated here, and the reason it's so good out of this zone, Wisconsin, Minnesota, is the clay soils and the limestone.

Limestone, it's calcium.

Calcium is the meat of the apple.

So that's what makes it so good.

In Washington, where we get all of our nursery stock from, it's all sandy soils, and they irrigate out of the Columbia River, and the Columbia River comes from the mountains and it's salty.

It's got a salt to it.

So the Washington Honeycrisp don't have the sweetness that the apples from this region have, you know?

When you get those in January, February, March, April, I don't even buy 'em.

I don't care for the taste of a Washington Honeycrisp.

- Well, certainly growing any kind of commodity, and apples are a commodity, there's a fixed amount you can get for it, and sometimes it's not enough to cover all the costs.

What have you done about that?

- Started making liquor.

- Well, tell us more.

- Apples have a decent margin, but if I had to make my living off of just the apples, probably the numbers wouldn't work out.

And my wife realized that early, and watched "Moonshiners" on TV, and so we got trained in distilling, and when we get down to the distillery, I'll show you more of how we got trained, but the margins in distilling are much, much better than they are here.

But you still have to go sell it, and that's my job.

I do the tastings in the liquor stores.

We have product in Austin at the Hy-Vee Liquor Store and at Apollo downtown on Oakland.

But Hy-Vee's our main customer.

I mean, I do tastings there.

I introduce people to our product that don't know anything about it, and I do tastings regularly there.

I mean, I'm there every couple months and I still run into people that have never heard of us.

- Well, hopefully they'll check out the website, maybe see the show, come out here for a... Do you have some sampling on the farm too?

- All the time, every day.

We're open seven days a week till Thanksgiving, and then after Thanksgiving we're open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays till Christmas.

We do a ton of gift boxes for people and it's fun to make.

- Well, how do we find you?

- We're in Rochester.

We're four miles northeast of Rochester off the old highway.

It used to be Highway 63 that went through town.

Now it's County Road 33.

Head out of town from where Shopko North Haley used to be in Rochester.

Head north, you'll see the blue signs that the county put up, shows you where to turn.

We're two miles down a beautiful valley to the east of that road.

You can only turn right, and it's a windy road, and it's the valley gets narrower and narrower, and then you'll just pop into our driveway, come up some big hills, and that's where we are.

- [Dan] And here we are.

- And here we are.

All our orchards are on side hills.

- Well, behind us, we can hear the picking crew coming up.

- Yep.

- Tell us about harvest and what it takes to get the job done.

- Well, starting this orchard when I was in my 50s, I realized that I wasn't gonna be crawling up ladders and holding 40-pound picking baskets, okay?

So I was at a convention in Great West Agri Convention and I met the owners of Munthof and they had one of their machines there.

And I looked at it and I said, "This is the perfect ticket."

I don't want my apples touched and banged around.

I want a hand to go under it, pick it.

I wanna snip the stem, all our Honeycrisps we snip the stem, put it on that conveyor, and it goes hands-free into the machine.

It's gently taken care of into the bin.

There's no banging or anything.

And that goes all the way through our processing, you know?

And that's the key.

And then with this equipment, I can tap the baby boomer generation of retired people for harvest.

There's tons of people that are my age or younger, from 65 to 76, that have nothing to do.

You know, they're sitting at home, and they come to the store and I say, "Well, if you wanna pick, you can come out and join the picking crew."

And that's where we started picking 'em all up.

I mean, it's just retired folks that come into the store to get apples and then, "Oh yeah, that'll be fine."

So we've got husbands and wives that back up.

I mean, if somebody can't come, I've got a list of pickers that can come out and pop in for a day or two and help.

- [Dan] A great team.

- It is, it is.

You know, and I ran the picking crew up until this year, and then my wife booted me out and said, "At 70, I want your feet on the ground.

I don't want you up on the machine and I want you to take care of the store and the retail."

So I am kind of the gopher now.

- Well, it is amazing watching that machine move through the orchard between the trees, and as you have the pickers pick the apple and put it on the conveyor, it basically cradles it.

- [Jay] Yeah.

- And then puts it down into a big pallet.

- That's a bin.

- Bin.

- Or yeah, a bin.

They're a 20-bushel bin.

- So it brings that apple down.

It comes up with the belt, drops it into the bin, and it's very kind to the apple.

- Yeah, the feeder for the bin goes all the way to the bottom and it has a sensor on it, and it comes out and it comes down and it's slowed by a brush.

So it just comes out, just rolls out gently.

And then as the bin fills, that moves up.

When it gets to the top, we dump the bin, haul it away.

- Why is that handling so important for the quality of the apple?

- 'Cause then you don't have bruises.

You know, the biggest thing was we had to train our people not to squeeze the apple when you pick it.

You stick your hand under it and you just roll it up.

You just cradle it and the stem will go, (pops) you know?

And then when we do our Honeycrisps, we have a stem clipper and they reach in, it's concave and it snips the stem off.

And we do that to protect so that apples don't poke holes in other apples when they're in our bin for our Honeycrisps, which is the main apple we market to the grocery stores and the schools.

- Jay, people love to have apples all year long.

Fall harvest isn't all year long.

How do you get apples to the customer in say February?

- We don't.

What we do is sell out, and what we do is we sell as much as the good fruit that we can to the grocery stores and to the school districts, and then at the end of the season, we crush the rest of our apples and we go into liquor production.

So what we encourage people to do, our customers anyhow, is to come buy bushel boxes at the end of the season, 'cause the bushel box of this apple that you just ate or our Honeycrisp, they will last if you put 'em in your garage, if your garage is 40 degrees and not freezing and not heated to 60, but if it's 35, 40 degrees in your garage, that'll last for three months.

So you'll be eating our apples January, February, March, and by April, they should be gone.

And many people buy bushel boxes.

We close out our good fruit at the end of the year to people that want a box of fruit.

You know, we give 'em a good deal on it.

Stay tuned for more on "Farm Connections."

(bright upbeat music) - [Narrator] "Farm Connections" Best Practices brought to you by Absolute Energy.

(bright upbeat music continues) - My name's Daniel Kaiser, extension soil specialist for the University of Minnesota, and this is today's best practice.

Optimal alfalfa management is important to ensure maximum forage yield, and also quality.

Two things that we've been looking at recently at the University of Minnesota have been two major topics alfalfa growers typically deal with.

That's potassium management and also the management of sulfur.

One of the main questions I've been getting, particularly with potassium management, has been timing of application where some growers really are looking at pushing application towards later in the growing season for stand persistence.

One of the things that recent research tells us is that timing of application is less important than making sure that the optimal rate of potassium is there for a given crop.

So the key point here is that if you're an alfalfa grower, don't worry as much as when the potassium is applied.

Just make sure that you have enough for that crop within the given year.

Recent work with sulfur has also showed a large yield increase of that particular nutrient, particularly in soils that are 3% organic matter or less.

For the majority of the southeastern part of Minnesota, areas would be likely seeing a response to sulfur being more critical for yearly production within a particular growing season.

The other aspect that we've been seeing with sulfur has been an increase in protein.

The data from Rosemount we've been getting is an average about 2% increase in protein with 10 to 20 pounds of sulfur applied annually, regardless of what source we've been applying.

So the key points here with alfalfa when we start looking at it is always pay attention to your soil tests.

So one of the key critical components, be watching your potassium levels, making sure they're not dropping too low, that you're risking a potential deficiency of that particular nutrient.

Then with sulfur, one of the things we really stress is that there's not a good soil test for sulfur.

So one of the things you wanna watch out for is your soils that particularly are three or 4% organic matter in the top six inches of your soil, those are areas you're gonna be looking at some application of sulfur, so 20 to 25 pounds being what we're currently recommending for a sulfur production.

- Jay, we've transitioned into the packhouse and distillery.

What happens in here?

- Well, as you saw out in the orchard and our picking operations, that leads us to how we produce our product for the grocery stores.

The packhouse, which is out here in this facility, basically we dunk our apples in a tank disinfected with peroxide and vinegar, so it's organic disinfectant.

We scrub 'em, we fresh-water rinse 'em, we dry 'em, and then we run 'em through our Aweta packing system, which has got state-of-the-art software.

It's got three cameras and mirrors.

It takes 32 pictures of every apple.

If it sees any imperfection on the apple, it puts it into one of our bin fillers that we use for juice for human consumption.

If there's any holes in the apple or perforations or anything in the apple, that's called cull, and we have another bin that the apples are directed with holes in 'em to that one.

We can use that for liquor, but we can't use it for human cider.

And then the rest of the apples go to three other bin fillers.

We sort the small ones, the 123s, and the 130s, and the 113s, that's a count size, for school districts.

They're a little small apple.

And then we sort for the grocery stores.

80s, 88s, and 100s are what you see in the Hy-Vees and Fareway foods of the world.

And then they go into a cooler and we store our apples at 34 to 36 degrees in our cooler.

When they come in out of the orchard, they go into a cooler and we season them at 55 degrees for 10 days to get them acclimated to the cold.

Now when we're picking and the nights are in the 40s, we don't have to do that, but when it's in the 70s and we're bringing our fruit in, we have to gradually cool 'em down to 55.

Then we process 'em and then we put 'em in a 34-degree cooler.

- Why the acclimatation?

Is that to keep from sweating or- - It's basically to get the fruit adjusted to cold.

When we started picking Honeycrisp, we were picking and there were 90-degree days out there and those apples were 90 degrees, you know?

So you don't wanna bring 'em from 90 to 34.

You wanna bring 'em in and you wanna season 'em at 55 degrees and let them gradually cool to 55.

Then we process 'em and then they gradually cool down to 34, 36 degrees.

- And the advantage of that is?

- Longevity, keep the fruit crisp inside, keep the skin nice.

We do not wax any of our apples.

People hate wax on apples.

The Washington apples are waxed because it keeps the skin from getting wrinkly when they have 'em in storage for nine months.

You know, when you get an apple that's been in a controlled-atmosphere storage room for nine months, you gotta wax it or the skin's gonna look like a 90-year-old person, you know.

- You were talking about the processing equipment, and I'm guessing it's hundreds of thousands for that equipment.

- Oh, totally, yeah.

Our pack line, when we made the transition to a woman-owned company, my wife owns all of this, we had to get an appraisal, 'cause she had to get a mortgage, and so we had to have this pack line appraised, and the appraisal came in at just under a million dollars just for the apple processing equipment.

- Not including the distillery on this side.

- Yeah, not including what's in our background here.

Now we can move to the distillery.

The distillery is just a whole nother story, and what that is is basically our way of taking advantage of something that with a farm winery distillery license, it's a value-added product for us.

What we do is we sell all the fruit we can sell during the year, and then when the season is over, we gather up all the fruit that didn't sell, we go next door to our cider-pressing room, and we have a belt press and a grinder and a bin tipper that we imported from Austria, and we press all of our cider, and then we heat that room up and we ferment our rum and we ferment our brandy in these 1,000-liter totes you see in this room.

That's what we do all our work in.

And after the ferment is over, you know, we have to heat that room up to 80 degrees and get them boiling, and then they put out so much CO2 that to go in and put nutrients in, you have to open the doors.

It's almost lethal, you know, 'cause that's all they do.

You can't let oxygen get in the tote when it's fermenting or it stops the ferment.

So we have air traps on the top, and it's quite a process.

And then when it's all done, we bring it in here and we leave it for the winter.

And then during the summer typically is when we do our distilling.

We'll have anywhere from 40 to 80 totes out here that need to be distilled.

It takes a day to distill each tote, and they go into a 1,200-liter still.

And we use copper is what takes all the tannins and all the sulfites out of our liquor, so our liquor becomes very, very smooth.

This is a specially-designed still.

We can spend about seven hours to nine hours processing.

By the time we're done, it's probably closer to 10, and we gather some really smooth, clean liquor with awesome flavor, because we use 90% apple cider in our mash.

We don't use any water, you know?

And a little bit of molasses just to get us in the rum category for our rum, and if we're making our brandies, it's just 100% apple cider.

Then we flavor our barrels.

We buy oak barrels and we have flavors infused in the barrels like peach and black cherry and apple into the wood.

They're concentrated flavorings that are natural that soak in the wood, and then when our liquor ages in those for a couple years, the liquor absorbs those flavors.

So that's what gives our barrel-aged stuff some special character.

- Well, thanks for sharing.

- Thanks for coming.

- Well, that will about do it from here for today.

I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thank you for joining us on "Farm Connections."

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