Timeless Bounty by Thomas Pellechia

Author:Thomas Pellechia
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781580805360
Publisher: Burford Books

In October 1931, the Mohawk Valley’s Beech-Nut Company patented the first commercial vacuum jar. Not long thereafter, when the company released the first widely distributed baby food in a jar, Western New York apples enjoyed a successful market almost on their doorstep. Still, competition loomed, from the Midwest and especially from the West Coast.

Washington State was threatening to ship apples to states whose markets had been available to New York apple growers of earlier generations. In response, New York State apple growers joined in 1935 with New England growers to form the New York and New England Apple Institute, a promotion arm of the industry. The New York contingent was largely made up of Hudson Valley apple growers. In Western New York, growers formed the New York Apple Growers Association in 1950 to address fluctuating prices as well as the outlook for the future. Per capita apple consumption in the United States averaged thirty pounds per year in the 1950s, and New York had slipped to second in production behind Washington. Recognizing the threat, New York apple growers pressed for a government-sponsored marketing order, which came to fruition in 1959.

Going into the 1960s, apples accounted for nearly 60 percent of all New York fruit and nut sales. Wayne County accounted for about one-third of the apples produced in the nine apple-producing counties of New York. In 1964, however, New York apple production was just one million bushels greater than the production recorded for 1918. Luckily, even though apple production seemed stagnant, the Northeast market was large enough to take all the apples that New York growers produced: While the country on the whole consumed thirty pounds per capita annually, population growth in the Northeast had created an eastern market per capita consumption that neared forty pounds. The Lake Ontario apple district was here to stay.

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