Struggle of New York’s Apple Orchards Exemplifies U.S. Farm Troubles : Agriculture: Imports, overproduction, suburbanization and environmental woes make life tough for farmers in the Hudson Valley.

Nine generations of Cosmans, six generations of Clarkes and four generations of Crists have worked the land of the Hudson River Valley. Sometimes, their apple orchards have been bountiful; sometimes, they have not.

But generally, they have kept their problems to themselves. It is a measure of their fears for the future that they sought out reporters from the city to tour their farms and hear about their troubles.

“The last two or three years, apples have not made money,” said Steve Clarke from Prospect Hills Orchard Inc. in Milton.

Consumers and farmers worry about chemicals. Farmers can get more money selling their land to developers than farming it. Competition from the Northwest and abroad is squeezing their apples off store shelves. And bad weather and pests, of course, never go away.

How do growers survive?

“We go from year to year and look at the future and hope we’re going to be here,” Larry Cosman said at his Mt. Airy Farm in the hamlet of Middle Hope, where he grows 250 acres of apple trees.

“I think the odds are kind of against us in the sense that progress will prevail sooner or later and push out some of the farms,” he added later.

Not that the farmers are railing against progress. “We brought you up here to show we don’t have our heads in the sand,” said grower Jeff Crist.

Farmers are adapting by getting closer to consumers, with, for example, the pick-your-own orchards at Clarke’s farm, and with dwarf trees, which can be planted more densely and pruned and picked more easily. They also are starting sales organizations that market fruit from a group of farms and are selling directly to restaurants, at farm markets and stands and abroad.

“Ten years ago, it was enough to know what was going on in the confines of your orchard. It’s not enough anymore,” said Mike Moriello of New Paltz, trying to be heard over Joe Porpiglia’s water dump, which washes apples and sends them down to the waxer.

Not all have adapted. Some have sold their land, lot by lot.

“It’s like they’re treading water,” said Elizabeth Ryan, who owns a 35-acre farm with her husband and is compiling oral histories of valley farmers.

“In the ‘60s and ‘70s, farmers sold their land, but they sold it to farmers. Now they sell it to big real estate,” said Porpiglia, 60, as he looked out at farms that have been redeveloped for houses. “For sale” signs are interspersed among the apple blossoms.

Farmland preservation is fashionable, but Crist’s wife, Joy, said that just saving land is not the point. “The emphasis needs to be on supporting and strengthening the farm business,” she said.

That means more research and development, a good, steady labor force, and enough farmers so that there’s competition among businesses that support farms. “I don’t see a lot of good, active farms going out of business,” she said.

From the early 1800s, growers in the Hudson Valley shipped many fruits by sloop south to New York City and points beyond, including to South American countries now sending apples to the United States.

When Larry Cosman was a child, wholesale buyers from New York City would travel the valley, haggling with each farmer on his route.

In a 1938 booklet prepared for an apple blossom festival, growers noted they had “the best market in the world close at hand,” partly because city consumers cherished the fruits of upstate farms.

Cosman’s father sold Happy Bee Apples, with cheery, old-fashioned stickers plastered on wooden boxes. Most went no farther than metropolitan New York.

In the 1930s, Ryan said, there were 500 farms in Ulster County, on the Hudson’s western bank. In 1990, there are fewer than 200 family farms all along the valley, from New York City to Albany, a 140-mile stretch.

In 1986, Cosman, 43, abandoned Happy Bee, because he didn’t have the volume to market his own label. Now his apples, a dozen varieties from 40,000 trees, are Hudson Valley apples, as are his neighbors’.

“Sometimes you talk about it and get a little choked up,” he said. “It’s a family name. . . . It’s part of you. Farming is not really a job, it’s a lifestyle. And most farmers live, eat and breathe what they’re doing.”

But the bottom line must prevail over sentiment. “It’s an international business,” Cosman said, and the Hudson Valley growers had to market their fruit together to compete with similar labels for Michigan and Washington State apples.

Though exports remain a small slice of the U.S. apple business--13 million 42-pound bushels in 1988--the Cosmans sometimes export 75% of a crop.

Foreign climes seem very far away during a walk along Latintown Road in Ulster County. McIntosh and lesser-known types of apple trees spread out on all sides, looking as if nothing could touch the serenity.

But Alar did.

“If you grow apples, that changed your life forever,” Ryan said.

“On an emotional level, it was a terrible upset. . . . All those guys in Washington told us it was safe, and we believed them. We wanted to believe them,” said the Cornell-trained pomologist, or fruit specialist, who did not use Alar on her farm.

Alar, also known as daminozide, is a growth regulator that slows maturation and improves color and storage, making it easier to manage harvests. But even in February, 1989, when the Natural Resources Defense Council issued its report linking Alar and cancer, few growers were using it, said Ulster County Extension fruit expert Warren Smith.

Nevertheless, apple prices and sales fell. Growers still are trying to recover from losses estimated at $100 million.

Like consumers, Cosman said, farmers have a hard time figuring out which experts to believe. But they respond to consumers and to costs, Moriello said, and for chemicals, the cost has gone up 30% to 50% in recent years.

Smith said all the valley’s apple growers use integrated pest management, a system that combines ecological, non-chemical methods and natural predators with chemicals, ideally fewer and fewer of them.

“We have never recommended calendar spraying when other options are available,” he said. “Would you take an aspirin if you didn’t have a headache?”

For these growers, migraines are reserved for coping with apple prices. Though supermarkets were selling apples for up to 99 cents a pound, Mike Moriello said he was paid 19 cents a pound wholesale.

Preliminary figures for 1989 show Washington State alone growing 119 million bushels for eating and processing, a glut that many growers say combined with the Alar scare for a disastrous year. Michigan was second with 23.8 million bushels, and New York third with 22.9 million.

Farmers who made it this far intend to survive.

“We have whittled away our farm population to 2%,” Ryan said. “The people who are in agriculture now are the people who really want to do it. They’re very insightful. They balance an extreme number of risk factors that they don’t control, unlike a lot of other businesses.

“There is one saying in the farm community: ‘These are the greatest gamblers in the world.’ ”