The farmer who lost 150,000 pounds of apples
This newsletter is all about people feeding the community. But sometimes, there’s too much food to give away
If this were a normal year, a few weeks ago school-age children and teenagers across the Portland Public Schools and David Douglas school districts might’ve finished their lunches with an apple from Hood River Valley’s Kiyokawa Family Orchards.
This year, that fruit ended up sitting in a cooler, languishing like forgotten takeout, until the next harvest season came along and pushed it out. With so much fruit sitting around, the Kiyokawa family hoped to give as much as they could away. A few weeks ago, they donated 11 cases of apples to Feed the Mass, Jacobsen Valentine’s nonprofit cooking school we highlighted two weeks ago.
But most of the apples ended up in the compost pile, due to lack of buyers or ways to get the fruit into the hands of those who need it. “You saw onions, potatoes being dumped, we’d love to do that,” third generation orchardist Randy Kiyokawa said. “We didn’t have any way to get it to people who need it. [Many donation places] could only take so much. We did the food bank, community services … If I'm trying to get rid of them, so is everybody else.”
Product loss is a normal part of farming. At Kiyokawa, in a typical year 10 tons of fruit end up in the compost pile. This year, however, the farm is on track to lose anywhere from 75 to 90 tons, Randy said. Even with a diverse range of buyers -- the Kiyokawas sell at farmers markets and their own farmstand, to restaurants, and juice producers and cideries, who have also slowed or shut down completely -- Covid-19 has affected nearly every avenue of commerce, Randy said.
“The restaurants, that just completely stopped,” Randy said. “The stores, at first, bought a bunch and then they slowed down. What hurt us the most was the school orders. We supply Portland Public Schools and David Douglas school districts, and for Portland Public Schools we do a lot. I was probably sitting on about 75 tons of fruit that we donated or the majority of it composted...a couple weeks ago I turned off my cooler because I had to get ready for cherry season.”
Run by the Kiyokawa family, the farm has been growing fruit in Hood River Valley at their eponymous farm for more than 100 years. Entering its fourth generation, the Kiyokawa family farm has weathered two World Wars, internment after the Pearl Harbor attack, and now, a global pandemic.
The Kiyokawa family first came to the United States in 1905, when Randy’s grandfather worked on railroads along the West Coast, eventually landing in Hood River near Lost Lake. After years of working hard he was able to start buying land to farm there in 1911, back when the sought-after resource was lumber.
Randy’s mother and father, Michiko and Mamoru, met when their families were interned during World War II and returned to the Hood River Valley in 1951, buying a 25-acre orchard that would later become Kiyokawa Family Orchards. Randy took over the farm in 1987 after Mamoru fell ill, and continues to run the farm with help from his three kids, his four older sisters, and Michiko, who will turn 97 this September.
As the farm’s orchardist, Randy has wildly diversified the fruit selection, and the family now grows an astounding amount of fruit on their 207 acres: more than 130 varieties of apples, 15 to 18 types of Asian pears, nearly two dozen varieties of pears, and a “miscellaneous” fruit list (think grapes, pluots, the plum-cherry cross called pluerries, kiwis, donut peaches, quince, nectarines, chestnuts) that outpaces many other full-scale farms.
Though COVID-19 has altered everything we’ve come to know as normal, many aspects of farmlife have plowed on. There was planting and pruning to do in the spring, tending and picking to come in the summer and fall. The 30 or so orchard employees at Kiyokawa have been able to safely work thanks in large part to the scale of the farm and the nucleus-centric housing the farm provides free of charge.
Still, this isn’t the worst storm the Kiyokawas have weathered, Randy said. In 1989, a chemical called Alar, sprayed onto apples to help them ripen longer on the tree, caused a nationwide scandal. When the EPA determined that it was potentially cancerous, the apple industry nearly collapsed, even though many farms, including Kiyokawa, never sprayed their fruit with it.
“Nobody bought apples,” Randy said. “You couldn’t even pick apples and give them away. The USDA is in charge of the public schools, and they totally dropped buying apples for school lunches even though most of us didn’t use it.”
Pandemic aside, making a living as a farmer has never been more difficult, Randy said. Commodity prices are so low that even Hood River’s premium fruits, like d’anjou pears, aren’t breaking even. “There are a lot of farmers who got out in the last few years or want to get out,” he said. “When I first came back to farming, the average farm was 45 acres. Now it’s well over 150. Farmers are selling, and their neighbor buys it up, or nameless corporations run by someone local but with outside interests come in with deep pockets.”
Already, Hood River is starting to reopen. Randy said articles in the paper informed the community the city wanted a “soft opening,” that even though places were opening, residents should still stay home until the city could get a better handle on best practices. In the meantime, the Kiyokawas are working out the details of their farmstand and the farmers markets they visit. Their workers, too, have had to make adjustments to living arrangements to better control social distancing. But there are still so many moving parts to keep the farm running, pandemic or not.
“This is a one family operation,” Randy said. “I do have people who help out, an accountant, bookkeeper, marketing, still, everything goes through me. It’s just a lot to try to accomplish in a 24-hour day.”
— Samantha Bakall
Samantha Bakall is a Portland-based, Chinese American writer whose work has appeared in The Oregonian, where she covered food for four years; Eater; The San Francisco Chronicle, Travel Oregon and more. Find her work at samanthabakall.com and on Instagram.