Aug 5, 2008
Not-So-Peachy Years Require Diverse Measures

Back-to-back “100-year freezes” in the early 1980s convinced the Watson family they had too many eggs in the peach basket, and that started a gradual shift to more vegetable production.

Three years ago, the South Carolina family began a shift of some of its vegetable acreage to organic production. So far, it’s worked well, but dry weather has helped, greatly reducing pest pressure. What might happen in a wet year makes Joe Watson nervous.

“The dry weather has really been a help to us,” he told a group of farmers touring his farm in June. “If it gets wet, we’ll be challenged.”

Joe – his full name is Joseph Henry Watson II – and his brother Jerrold Watson Jr. own Jerrold Watson and Sons near Monetta, S.C. It’s a farm of about 1,500 acres, 900 growing the main crop, peaches, and 550 growing vegetables and apples, pears, plums, nectarines and strawberries. They market under the name Watsonia Farms.

The growers touring the farm were with the International Fruit Tree Association, there to look at peaches, not vegetables. And the reason for the peach interest was because the Watsons are playing a role to solve problems afflicting the industry across the Southeast.

The Watsons’ farm on “the Ridge,” one of the more famous peach growing areas in the world, and the Watson family has been innovative in the industry. Col. R.B. Watson, Joe and Jerry’s distant cousin and South Carolina’s first commissioner of agriculture, is credited as being the first commercial peach producer to ship peaches out of the state in the 1870s.

But the area’s main crop around 1900 was cotton, until the boll weevil took a bite out of the industry and then, until nearly 1930, the big crop was asparagus.

“The asparagus industry was huge around here,” Joe said. The Watsons still grow some.

In the 1920s, farmers in New Jersey began to grow asparagus and, being closer to markets in the Northeast, they took the market. Joe’s grandfather, after whom Joe is named, was a grower and also sales manager of the Monetta Asparagus Association. Seeing the writing on the wall and looking back at the family’s experience with peaches, “he gathered six of the main asparagus growers together and told them if they’d plant 60 acres of peaches each, 20 acres of three varieties each, they’d never regret it,” Joe said.

The industry grew to where 35 packinghouses were sending out peaches from the Ridge, Joe said. But freezes in the early 1980s took out a lot of growers, reduced packing sheds to 10 and convinced the Watsons they, too, needed something besides peaches.

“It really took a lot of South Carolina growers out of the fresh peach business,” Joe said. “We (the Watsons) were 99 percent peaches in the ’80s. That was just too much exposure.”

While two-thirds of their acreage is still peaches, armillaria root rot is becoming a major problem. The disease persists in old peach tree roots and infects new orchards. It swiftly kills trees, leaving behind nice-looking mushrooms in a ring around a dead tree trunk. Experiments are under way trying to control the disease – and some of them are being conducted on the Watson farm.

“We’ve got seventh-generation peach orchards,” Joe said.

Since peaches demand good sites and good sites are limited, new orchards go in shortly after old ones are pulled. Peach tree short life is a major problem, partly solved by the rootstock Guardian that is resistant to ring lesion nematodes. But Guardian is not resistant to armillaria.

The Watsons produce vegetables on about 700 acres of land and pack them out for sale from their packing shed. They grow yellow and zucchini squash, pickling and slicing cucumbers, bell peppers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, eggplant and acorn, butternut and spaghetti squash.

About 15 percent of the vegetables are grown organically.

“Retailers tell us, ‘you grow it and we’ll buy it,’ but they take only about 20 percent of what they say they want,” Joe said. “Instead of pallets, they’re buying boxes. The organic explosion is more like a firecracker.”

While the growth rate in organic consumption is about 20 percent per year, 20 percent of a small amount is still a small amount, he said.

“A little goes a long way,” he said.

The organic premiums that lured them into organic production have also been shrinking, he said.

“We used to get about $18 for a box of organic vegetables when others were selling for $12,” he said. “Now, the margin is often only $2 more a box.”

Still, the Watsons are continuing to expand organic production, this year adding organic peaches, plums, nectarines and muscadines.

Still, he said, buyers like Whole Foods and consumers are good to work with and loyal, but the organic label has not proved to be important at the two farm markets the Watsons operate. The markets are called Peaches and Such I and II and are open six days a week during the growing season.

Organic production is more costly, Joe said. The sprays must be made more frequently.

“We’ve been pretty well able to keep insect pressure down,” he said, using pyrethrins and Bt sprays.

Diseases are another matter.

“We’ve got anthracnose and gummy stem blight, bacterial spots and specks, rots and powdery mildew,” he said. “We have only a few fungicides that are OMRI-approved: sulfur and copper, plus Seranade and Sonata. With low to moderate pressure, it’s worked well.”

In a year of heavy pressure, he said, diseases would overwhelm the plants, shortening the harvest and the yield.

The Watsons sell retail from the two farm markets, where they offer fresh fruits and vegetables and other products, including peach ice cream, sweet breads, apple and peach cider, a line of bottled salsas and mustards and a spice concoction called Jerrold’s Secret Spice – “daddy’s recipe”– developed by their father, who came back to the farm after World War II and operated it until a few years before he died two years ago.

Things aren’t easy in either the fruit or vegetable business, Joe said, but despite Joe’s “warnings,” his son Joseph Henry III (called Jeph) came back to the farm after he finished college in 2003, and brother Jerry has younger children who may look at it favorably as well.

“We are proud to say that we enjoy the reputation of being forerunners in the industry, using cutting-edge agricultural practices such as trickle irrigation, plastic mulch for vegetable growing, computer technology, IPM (integrated pest management) and consumer product safety programs,” Joe said. “We have a strong working relationship with the horticulturists at Clemson University, who use our farm for researching innovative practices as well as varietal test blocks.”

The Easter freeze last year destroyed almost their entire peach crop. While vegetables are also frost-sensitive, the long growing season in South Carolina allows for replanting. They plant vegetables about April 1 and start picking squash about May 15 – and continue packing vegetables into late November.




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