Dramatic loss, remarkable recovery in the ‘Napa’ of peach growing

Talbott Farms grows peaches in Palisade, Colo.
Talbott Farms grows peaches in Palisade, Colo.
(Photo courtesy of Talbott Farms)

One of the great harbingers of summer in Colorado are the roadside Palisade peach stands that pop up at busy intersections and gas stations across the state. Of course, these highly sought-after peaches are also prominently featured at grocery stores and farmers markets all season long.

Palisade, Colo., west of Denver and slightly east of Grand Junction, is where the family peach growers at Talbott Farms call home. Peach cultivation in Palisades began in the late 1800s.

Today, Charlie and Bruce Talbott, whose great-great-grandfather, Joseph Evan Yeager, moved from Iowa and began planting orchards in Palisade in 1907, are furthering the family’s peach legacy amid myriad challenges of the day from weather to labor to inflation.

The Packer recently connected with the Talbott brothers to talk all things peaches from Palisade.

Palisade peaches are iconic in Colorado. What does the market for Talbott Farms peaches look like beyond the state?

Charlie: Our key markets are throughout the Midwest. Three-fourths of our fruit does leave Colorado and we ship from Texas and up through Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas and Iowa. We also ship a lot to Nebraska, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Those are our key markets.

In terms of marketing and merchandising, do Palisade peaches resonate as much with shoppers elsewhere as they do in Colorado?

Bruce: Palisade is the Napa of the peach industry and when most people think about Colorado peaches, they think of Palisade peaches.

Charlie Talbott
Charlie Talbott

What can you tell us about this year’s crop?

Charlie: This year, there's a story behind the story.

The year went relatively well. We feel like we’ll probably harvest about 70%-75% of what our full crop potential is for 2022. We had crop reduction in some areas and spotty crop losses due to spring frost. Other than that, fruit quality has been good, and fruit timing has been in the fairly normal range. All told, this will be a decent year.

Bruce: The story behind the story is we had a storm in October of 2020 that set record or near-record low temperatures. The new record was 13 degrees below what it had been. We ran from nine degrees to 13 degrees in late October, when the trees were still green and had not hardened off.

Bruce Talbott
Bruce Talbott

How did this impact crops?

Bruce: We got set back pretty dramatically and, in the big picture, it set the industry back dramatically. We replaced 30,000 trees this year that had been killed. We still have another 20,000 to replace next year.

The silver lining to the whole thing is that it does give us a chance to rebalance our variety mix and to bring in young trees. Orchards typically have a 20-year lifespan. But we had some orchards that were going to give 10-15 years because of weakened trees and disease issues.

So, there's always some benefits as well as costs to replanting, though the reinvestment cost was steep and has set our production back for two or three years. But in another four or five years, we will produce more than we ever have.

Charlie: The last time a freeze of that magnitude happened in the Grand Valley, which is at the east end of Palisades, it was 1963. It took a lot of the fruit-producing trees on the southwest side of Grand Junction. An area we call the Redlands was taken clear out of commercial peach production because the freeze came on the heels of some bad years.

With this recent freeze, we lost an immediate 2.5 million pounds of peach production, but we're probably another 2.5 million pounds of fruit in excess of what we had prior to that freeze, so we'll rebound fairly quickly.

And as Bruce said, we get to be thoughtful in balancing our varieties. We do a lot of different varieties, as do other peach-growing districts, to try to extend availability. For us, the classic peach season is mid-July through the third week of September. We're in great shape for that.

Replacing 30,000 trees sounds like a serious undertaking, but you sound positive about the future.

Charlie: We have 180,000 trees, so 20% of our trees in the end had to be replaced. But. we’re on a growth trajectory. We were already well on our way to shipping more fruit from our facilities than we ever have [before the frost], and that just set us back a little bit. When you lose a tree, it's five years before the replant comes into production. So, it was the growth trajectory on the balance of our acreage that wasn't so badly affected, and that’s what is bringing us right back into volume very quickly. And when the replants come in, that's just going to augment that even further.

How is Talbot Farms positioned for the future? Are you optimistic about the company's growth and do you think inflation will impact sales?

Charlie: That's certainly a concern across the industry. Colorado has just passed some labor laws that are directed toward farm workers, so we've got inflation and increased labor costs.

There’s a lot of pressure for us to automate as much as we can, wherever we can. However, there's so much hand labor that doesn’t lend itself to automation in the pruning and thinning and harvesting process of peaches. So, that will be a major challenge going forward.

And with indexing our prices upward, we've been concerned that it might affect movement in a negative direction. We've not seen that significantly this year, so we're just going to have to roll with it, watch closely and run as tight of ship as we can. But overall, we're optimistic. We think we've got a really great opportunity with Palisade peaches with longevity and loyalty in the marketplace. We want to keep that coming as cost-effectively as we possibly can.

Other reasons for optimism?

Bruce: Younger people are coming back to [agriculture] within our own organization and within the industry as a whole. There's quite a few young growers now, so I'm optimistic that the industry will be here for the long haul.

That's encouraging that a younger population is attracted to farming. Why do you think this is the case?

Bruce: I think they have enough confidence in the future of the industry that they're excited about being part of it. So, I would say confidence more than anything. And some of these younger farmers that we're seeing show up didn't necessarily come from this. They didn't grow up in this industry. We see people who have come into it from other careers who are dynamic and energized.

Many growers in the West are facing water issues. How is Talbott Farms managing drought?

Bruce: We are entirely dependent on irrigation from snowmelt and reservoirs in the mountains. Fortunately, we have very senior water rights, so if there's water, especially in the Colorado River Basin, we have a bigger watershed from which we’ll get water.

In the last 30 years, we’ve also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on various efficient micro-sprinkler systems and various ways to really get the most out of the water we have.

We have an advantage, but we also know we have a resource that other people in both directions — east and west — would really like to have, and if we're not diligent in our use of that resource, at some point, we're likely to lose access to at least some of it. We want to be very careful with how we manage it. We've really had to work to manage the alkalinity challenges that we have with high pH in our water, and so that also has been part of the investment that we've made in the water arena.

How important is technology to your business?

Charlie: It’s of ever-increasing importance. Many of the opportunities in technology are more easily obtained on the packing and shipping side of things.

There's also a lot of willingness within the industry to share notes and collaborate — to collectively descend on or embrace things that have worked for peers in the industry, and I think that's going to be helpful for all of us.

Bruce: I think technology around pest control, water usage and equipment will continue to be a bigger and bigger factor, but I don't see how we're ever going to take the human element out of handling peaches, especially from the tree. They’re fragile and we've got to make decisions about fruit maturity and when to harvest. I don’t see how a machine can make those kinds of decisions.

I think the human element is always going to be a big part of what we do.

 

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