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The Apple Farm in Anderson Valley
Mendocino County Orchard Flourishing through Creativity and Persistence

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by Will Stockwin

After their first harvest on the 32-acre place they call The Apple Farm, it took only one look at the return for Tim and Karen Bates to see that just growing and selling apples wasn’t going to pay the bills. Karen said they hadn’t really believed the previous owner’s claim that the place would pay for itself in three years. “We’re not stupid,” she says. “But we didn’t think it would be as bad as it was.”

She said it didn’t help that between the two of them “we knew almost nothing about marketing fresh apples. After that first season we both had a sinking feeling that we’d made a horrible mistake.” Fifteen years later, even they seem amazed by how much energy and creativity has been needed to correct it.

Organic Transition

The Apple Farm is tucked in against a bend of the Navarro River, just west of Philo in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley. In bloom, it’s the sort of place you might imagine heaven looks like.

But it’s a setting as long on beauty as it is short on supplemental employment or income opportunities. “Kind of a long way from anywhere,” is how Tim puts it. Making a go of it, then, meant finding new ways for the farm to pay for itself.

The couple set the stage for doing that with the decision to transition to organic production methods. One season of chemical farming was all it took.

“One of the neighbors did contract spraying for us that first year, and we were horrified by how much pesticide got used,” Karen says. “We were afraid to let the kids go out, and neither of us liked going into the orchard after it was sprayed.”

Tim said going organic was a no-brainer. “It’s definitely a lot more work, but any other way just doesn’t work for us.”

The organic transition began with another mistake that still makes Tim shake his head. “The area we chose to start with was the one the workers for the previous owner had called the ‘devil’s corner’ because of all the soil and pest problems,” Tim says. “I didn’t know it at the time, but that was really the worst place to start, and probably made the transition take longer than it might have otherwise.”

Jam, Chutney and Cider

While Tim began adjusting the orchard to an organic operation that today produces between 70 and 80 apple varieties from roughly 15.5 planted acres, Karen put more effort into marketing the crop. “I got a lot of help from the local market with selling fruit. They were really terrific,” she says. “But the money loss kept on.”

They began looking at the amount of their fruit being diverted to the processor for juice every year, “where you get next to nothing for it,” Tim says. With help from Karen’s parents, Don and Sally Schmidt, who owned the French Laundry restaurant in Yountville, they began processing their own line of jams and chutneys for sale at the farm stand just inside the main entrance to the farm. Then, as now, the jam was made in 10-cup batches. “Everything is hand chopped, just like you’d do it at home,” Karen says. “We’ve never wanted to get into a production kitchen kind of operation. We’re selling a very high-end product ($10 for a 16-ounce jar) and we want people to get their money’s worth.

“Being low-tech takes more effort, but it works for us,” she says. “Getting into finished products not only increased our cash flow, it spread it out more evenly through the year.”

The jams and chutneys opened a line of products that now also includes apple juice, hard cider, vinegar, apple syrup and apple balsamic vinegar (a mixture of syrup and vinegar). With the exception of the juice, which must be pasteurized, all are made on the farm and sold almost exclusively at the farm stand.

“It’s all very hands-on,” Tim says. “We do our own bottling in a three-at-a-time bottler, cap the bottles with a hand-capper, and label with a hand-crank labeler. The more we do ourselves, the less it costs to produce.”

He said on-farm processing now consumes roughly 35 to 40 tons of the farm’s annual production, which averages 185 to 225 tons. Last year that produced 250 cases of hard cider, 72 cases of syrup and 193 cases of the balsamic vinegar. Sales of the latter took off so quickly when it was introduced a couple of years ago that production had to be immediately increased to match demand.

The basic marketing plan for steadily increasing sales at the farm stand, the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market and the few retail outlets they use sounds deceptively simple. “It’s pretty much word-of-mouth,” Tim says. Carried by friends and clients to a well-heeled audience (see box below).

The Farm You Save May Be Your Own

At the California Farm Conference in Santa Rosa this fall, Tim will be speaking about his experiences saving his farm by becoming an entrepreneur. Mostly, he said, it takes a lot of hard work and the courage to try the things you feel strongly about.

Like selling bundled apple pruning cuttings. “It was Karen’s idea to sell them for $18 to $20 a bundle,” Tim says. “I laughed at first because I couldn’t believe anyone would buy them. Then Banana Republic ordered 500 cases. Now we sell everything we put in boxes, so we’re making money and cutting way down on the burn piles.”

Looking back on how far they’ve come since that first season of doubt, and all of the different things they’ve had to do to get the farm on solid financial footing, Tim laughs again.

“After 15 years, sometimes we even make a little money on the fruit.”