A trip to the Cornell Orchards is the perfect way to kickoff the fall season. Surrounded by apples and greenery, it was fascinating listening to people who worked at the orchards talk about the apple growing process. Additionally, we learned about the different kinds of apples and the various ways to ensure the apples stay fresh and delicious. I thoroughly enjoyed this trip and appreciated how accessible it was to the Cornell campus. I plan on revisiting the orchards with my friends to share the experience I had and the crisp apples!

Last Friday, I went to the Cornell Orchards. I set out on foot from Central Campus and characteristic of me, ended up getting lost along the way. Heading in the opposite direction of the Orchards, I circled back and ran into a fellow Rose Scholar and close friend who was also somewhat lost, though not quite as lost as me. In hindsight, the Orchards are not very far from Campus. I had gone many years ago with my family and as my friend and I approached the Orchards, everything started to look more familiar.

Once a majority of attendees arrived at the Orchards, we started on our guided tour. We saw a number of apple varieties, some of which were not yet named and just five years old or so. As we walked through the bright rows of trees, our tour guide answered questions about the Orchards and apples in general. One of the most interesting facts that I learned was that planting an apple seed will not result in the same variety of apple as the original fruit because virtually every variety is a hybrid of two other varieties. For instance, the Empire is a combination of Red Delicious and McIntosh. I was curious about climate effects on the apple trees over the past couple of years to which our tour guide answered that there is an irrigation system in place. This past year, the Cornell Orchards received enough rain water, but there are many other places, such as on the West Coast that are facing drought and water issues. Along the way, we got to taste the Snap Dragon – a Cornell-developed variety and got a glimpse at the organic varieties grown at the Orchards. It was really awesome to see the cider press and the stored apples that we will soon be drinking in a matter of days!

Much of what I learned that day reminded me of what Professor Stanley, professor of HADM 4300 Wines, talked about at the Becker-Rose Café Series last year and in her class. It is this idea that principles from every college at Cornell can be applied to the wine-making process, or in this case the apple growing process. (In case you did not know, grapes are grown at the Cornell Orchards, too!) There is the agricultural component, the business component, the policy component, the engineering of machinery component – to name a few. Like many sites on and off campus, the Orchards encompasses all that is Cornell. There is history, as well as, innovation present. I highly recommend that everyone make a trip to the Orchards. Now that we are in the fall season, it would be the perfect time to go! I know that I will be returning. One goal will be to not get lost on my next trip there. But if I do, hopefully I will run into a fellow Scholar to help me find the way!

On the first day that I got to Cornell, my roommate and I made a Bucket List and taped it to the wall. When you go to a school with waterfalls, nature trails, a plantation, a lake, and an orchard (just to name a few), it is hard to keep track of all the scenic activities to do on campus. When I noticed that Rose Scholars Program had an event at the Cornell Orchards, I knew I had to seize the opportunity and cross apple picking off my list.

This is what you will see when you arrive to the orchards: an endless amount of apples with the scenic hills as a backdrop.

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There are so many different kinds of apples just at this orchard. Each apple has its own unique characteristics. Sometimes we don’t think about the long and interesting process that goes into the perfect apple when we grab it from our dining halls. This is how the apples are stored and cooled before being shipped out to our dining halls and many other places.

Overall, I definitely recommend the Cornell orchards as an addition to your bucket list. Take advantage of this beautiful weather and reward yourself after a tough week  of prelims with a crisp and tasty Cornell apple!

Before Friday, I had never been to the Cornell Orchards before…. and I’m an international AG and rural development major… so that’s really sad. Needless to say, thank you Rose Scholars program for giving me a motive to go! 😀 Not only did I make a new friend on my way there (I got lost) but I learned some interesting facts about Cornell’s bred apples:

Cornell named one of the apples they bred “Snap Dragon” to market to children. It is sweet, crunchy, and absolutely delicious. Enjoy the pictures below of Cynthia and I enjoying them. Along with it, they made the “Ruby Frost,” which I did not get to try. After breeding these apples, they released the trees to the industry 4 years ago (and have not released more). They sold the Patent to the New York Apples Association who which to control their supply in attempt at keeping the quality great.

All in all, super glad I went!

Last Friday I finally made the long trek to the Cornell Orchards and it was well worth the journey. We were given a tour of the Orchards, which functions primarily as a research area and outdoor classroom, in addition to providing a venue for the public to visit and purchase apples and other local products.

It was fascinating to learn so much about the creation of new types of apples and all the work that goes into genetically evolving current varieties to design an apple with several favorable qualities. Apparently it’s necessary to graft, or attach, a specific branch to an existing one in order to ensure the production of a desired apple. These grafted stems grow to be about 12 feet tall and are supported by wiring, each tree being selectively pruned to promote a harvest with the most amount of apples possible per branch, achievable only by spacing each row correctly to allow sunlight to reach even the lowest branches. Traditional apple trees are no longer grown in these farms due to their inefficient production and space constraints. It was especially interesting to learn that when an apple seed is planted from a particular apple, the same type of apple won’t grow on the new tree. Rather, an entirely novel kind of apple will grow on that tree. The only way to perpetuate the strand is to graft it.

As someone who finds the topic of genetics captivating, it was great to have the opportunity to learn about genetics in such a new context where the ideas are actually put into practical use. It was also interesting to learn that Cornell has another off-campus apple research farm in which new apples are designed and marketed. The Empire apple, which is said to be very popular in the state of New York, was originally made by Cornell. Other varieties, such as the SnapDragon apple, which we got to pick and sample, was also a Cornell original.

Rows of SnapDragon apples

I really enjoyed seeing a different aspect of Cornell and appreciating it from a new perspective. I also liked learning about a topic that superficially seems rather mundane, but actually is quite intricate and heavily planned. It makes it possible to be more aware of and marvel at the complex path that food takes to get to the average consumer, even if it’s something as simple as an apple.

So it’s (almost) that time of year again! If the Ithaca weather permits, fall is just around the corner and pretty soon, the apple cider will be hitting the dining halls again. I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the Cornell Orchards last Friday afternoon with some of the other Rose residents and had a great time learning more about the science of apple planting.

In between the rows of snap dragon apple trees.

During the course of the tour, I learned more about the system of growing an orchard. The Cornell Orchards uses a modern tall spindle growing system for a lot of their apples. The trees are planted three feet by twelve feet apart from each other in rows. Because of this, the trees will always stay relatively small in stature because of their competing root systems underneath the soil. New to my knowledge, apple trees can’t simply be grown by planting a seed; a limb of an already existing tree has to be spliced onto another tree in order to grow that fruit. Because of this, the apples don’t necessarily stay true to their type – breeding apples with this method always creates another cross breed. Our guide also showed us Cornell’s two newest breeds – the Snap Dragon and Ruby Frost apples, the former of which is very tart, but delicious, almost like a watermelon.

Our guide also gave us some insight into the apple cider making process. The Orchards uses a cold press to grind unbruised and fresh apples through the machine. The apples are made into an applesauce-like mash and eventually gets pasteurized and bottled before it’s sold. This season, it’s expected that the Orchards will make 1500 gallons of apple cider; get ready to see some cider in the dining halls in the next week or so!

Over the years I have amassed my share of fruit picking memories–vines bursting with blackberries, beetles tunneling through strawberry patches, prickly peaches from my grandmother’s tree that survives amid Beijing smog. Yes, there is something very engaging about gathering and consuming your own produce. But the missing link in my past fruit pursuits has always been understanding the science behind the fruit, the experimentation done by researchers and farmers to streamline the process or yield the largest harvest.

We followed our tour guide through a grassy corridor between rows of closely planted, rod thin apple trees, heaving with fruit. He turned to us,  started giving the tour spiel, and almost every fact he mentioned completely threw off my assumptions about growing apples. It certainly made me realize that the process involves much more planning and science that I once thought. For example, I (very ignorantly, in retrospect) thought that you could just plant the seed of an apple and a tree would grow and you would have an apple tree. Of course it is not that simple. If you plant an apple seed, it will grow into a different fruit from the original apple the seed came from. This fact alone raised my admiration for apple farmers ten fold, for dealing with such a complicated fruit. Also, I had believed that every apple on the same tree must be the same quality apple. In reality, apples that receive the most sunlight are the best quality and are sold for eating, the ones hidden at the bottom of the tree are more likely to be processed into other apple products like cider. I had a lot to learn.

All of the tour was wonderfully informative and a little hands on (we got to pick apples of course), an experience I would recommend to anyone. The best part was after we had been walking in the hot sun around the orchards, we were lead to the apple storage room, a huge, chilled room stocked with wooden crates of apples piled twenty feet high. It was cool and refreshing and it smelled divinely of the sweet, crisp essence of apple, ‘like a yankee candle’ a friend mused. If only I could bottle up that scent and extract it whenever I need a little reminder to appreciate the hardworking people who study and grow the food that we all too often take for granted.

When we think about orchards, and agriculture in general, we usually think of humble farmers working the land to earn their meager salary. And to a point that’s true – farming is hard work with long hours and high risk, especially in the northern climates. However, agricultural practices also require a surprising amount of scientific research and business knowledge to succeed. This leads to research institutions like Cornell Orchards.

At Cornell Orchards, researchers explore the science side of things, with research on different growing techniques, grafting, new apple crosses, and alternative (organic) pesticides and disease control. They even work with other agriculture specialists, like a bee researcher who advocated for allowing wild bees to handle the pollination of the fruit trees. It’s amazing how modern science guides the use of the ancient process of bringing food from the earth.

Possibly even more important, though, is how much business sense goes into growing the apples. For example, researchers are in charge of crossing parent apple breeds to invent new, and oftentimes better, apples, but they don’t just base it on arbitrary ideals of flavor. They have to consider how well an apple will keep over time, where it can successfully be distributed and the preferences of consumers in those areas, where the apple will be grown and whether it can yield enough apples in that climate to make the grower a maximum profit, whether the market is already saturated with a specific flavor of apple, like tart or sweet, etc. Then the researchers have to decide which qualities take preference, since finding an apple that meets all these requirements would be some sort of holy grail apple.

All in all, the apple growing business is strange mish-mash of achieving a maximum profit while discovering new and better apple flavors. It is the nature of the business to make a business out of nature.

Two different varieties of apples – Black Arkansas on the left and Honeycrisp on the right.

The massive cooler room where the Orchard stores their apples throughout the winter.

Though I’ve lived on the east coast my whole life and gone apple picking nearly every year with my family, I had never tried a Honeycrisp apple. And after trying a Snapdragon, a Cornell-bred new apple who has Honeycrisp as a parent, I realize I’ve been missing out. I had also never thought about all the work and science that goes into growing and maintaining an orchard. I always assumed that you planted an apple seed and hoped it grew into a tree, but as I learned at the orchards yesterday, that’s not the case. In fact, if you try to grow an apple from an apple seed from a store-bought apple, the tree would most likely produce inedible crabapples. The only way to replicate an apple tree is to graft some of the plant onto roots, and most orchards graft onto dwarf roots to maximize apple production and to keep the trees small enough that sunlight can touch every apple. In addition, no two apples are exactly alike, because every apple has to be cross pollinated and therefore have two parent apples.

Apples can be stored for up to 10 months, which was shocking to me. An apple picked off a tree in October can, if stored correctly, be eaten in August the next year and still be crisp and juicy. The apples, once picked, are stored in either an oxygenless sealed refrigeration room, or in a room that is essentially an enormous refrigerator. The apple breeding research facility places a lot of focus on not only the taste of the apple, but also its storability and its resistance to disease. For example, McIntosh apples are rarely used for breeding in New York because of its susceptibility to apple scab.

My favourite part about the trip, however, was that when I arrived at the orchards I didn’t know anyone in the group, and when I left I had plans to get dinner and go to the homecoming fireworks with other rose scholars.

On the eighteenth of September, a quite lovely yet overbearingly sunny day, I decided to pay a visit to the Cornell Orchards. I really did want to be on time, but it had just so happened that I had a physics problem set due the same day that I was scrambling to finish. However, it was a blessing in disguise because I ran into someone finding her way to the orchards herself, also lost and late. We asked around to find directions for the rest of the group, and once we did, we learned about the plethora of apples the Cornell Orchards had to offer.

Some fun facts about the Cornell Orchards:

• Cornell patented two new apple plants, called the Snapdragon and the Ruby Frost. The snapdragon earned its name for being sweet, cool, and crunchy, and the Ruby Frost is red and is harvested during the frost season.
• Cornell then sold said patents to the New York Apple Association.

Here’s a picture of Genesis and me sinking our teeth into some SnapDragons:

Genesis and I sinking our teeth into some freshly picked SnapDragon apples!

Some more fun facts about apples:

• no two apple plants will be exactly the same
• there are rows of apple branches spaced out just perfectly for the neighboring rows to receive the proper amount of sunlight
• farmers are constantly trying to invent new ways to increase apple production
• honey bees are vital to apple production
• reject apples that aren’t worthy of being sold get turned into cider

Later on in the tour, we learned more about the cider making process. Here’s a youtube video on Cornell Orchard’s cider making process:

I had such a great day learning about the Cornell Orchards and the apple production process as a whole, a great way to end my week!

Cornell never seems to disappoint with the numerous facilities on campus. Although it is a trek up to the Cornell Orchards, the operation includes storage and packing facilities, cider press, research lab, and 37 acres of fruit plantings. From the latest selections to century-old antiques, the Orchards grow more than 50 varieties stretching out the fresh-apple harvest season. There are numerous apples for fresh eating but others are grown for use in custom-blended ciders, soon to be found in the dining halls!

In addition to apples, the Orchards grow peaches, plums, cherries, pears, grapes, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, among many others.

The apples are stored in a cool, low-oxygen environment to help keep the grown fruit fresher, longer, practices pioneered at Cornell.

Also pioneered in Cornell’s breeding program is a new variety of apple, RubyFrost. RubyFrost is the offspring of Braeburn and Autumn Crisp. In addition, the SnapDragon which is the offspring of Honeycrisp and an apple in the breeding program with fruit similar to Jonagold.

Seeing what goes into the production and growth of food, gives one a new perspective and appreciation for the food that we can easily access.

Apple growing, it turns out, is a lot more complex than expected, and the Cornell Orchards is the perfect place to learn all about it. I did not know, for instance, that every type of apple is a graft of two different apples, and that naturally planted seeds will produce a random, unpredictable hybrid apple. I also didn’t know that apple trees are specifically bred to be small, and that the only big ones are really old. After a brief lesson on the breeding of apples and the grafting process we went on a tour of the orchards, sampled some “new” varieties of apple (the snapdragons are delicious), stopped by the organic section, and then went inside to learn about the cider press. Cider, unfortunately, isn’t available for about another week and a half. After that we did a little browsing in the store and headed back to campus.

Growing apples.  It seems simple, right?  You plant a seed, it grows into a tree, you pick the apples, and then you sell them.  But its not that simple at the Cornell Orchards, or for that matter, at any of the commercial orchards across the country.

We started our tour of the Orchards at the old apple trees planted a hundred years ago when the orchard was just starting; big trees you could sit under and enjoy the shade.  But the trees that make up the majority of the Orchard look entirely different.  I never would have imagined that the best apples would come from a twig-like tree growing 3 feet from a neighbor on either side.  These odd-looking plants allow the sun to reach the fruit, producing higher quality apples that can be sold as table fruit for more money than apples from the larger trees.

I was struck by the complexity of an seemingly simple operation.  It all starts with the breeding of the apples to create the perfect combination of flavor, texture, resistance to disease and pests, and storability.  Cornell has invented many apples over the years, including the well-known Empire, and recently came out with two new varieties: Snap Dragon and Ruby Frost.  In addition to creating new types of apples, creating perfect trees is just as important.  By grafting, pruning, watering, and spraying, the Orchards is able to grow excellent quality apples in high quantities.  Once picked, some apples are processed into apple cider while others are sold or stored for the spring (they can keep up to 10 months in a room with carbon dioxide and little oxygen!).  From the breeding to the selling of the apples, the apple production system is far from simple, and I know I will appreciate each bite of that Empire I pick up at the dining hall a bit more knowing all the research and hard work that went into getting it there.

It was a beautiful day in Ithaca (maybe even too hot) as we walked around the beautiful orchards located right across from the Vet School. Yes, that is the “other” side of campus but the orchards are still relatively close especially via the TCAT. Prior to coming to the orchards, I hardly thought about all of the work it took to producing apples. I saw firsthand how the apple branches were clipped to twine so that they would not become too heavy for the tree. Also, apple trees are extremely susceptible to diseases which can be seen by discoloration and damage of the leaves. Those who manage the orchards look carefully for this and they spray pesticides to treat the disease and make sure it does not spread to the other trees.

My favorite part about the orchards trip was actually getting to sample all of the apples. The Snapdragons were so delicious and they are actually found in the dining halls on campus. The apples that are too small or damaged to be sold or eaten are stored separated and eventually used to produce applesauce and apple cider. This prevents being wasteful.