Pick-your-own farms, agriculture as entertainment, and the pastoral fantasy
Issue 201: Two farm owners discuss how COVID-19 has impacted business this season and how pick-your-own morphed from exclusively agriculture into entertainment.
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Apple picking at Aamodt’s Apple Farm in Stillwater, Minnesota, will end about four weeks earlier this season than last year.
But this isn’t a casualty of COVID-19 — it’s thanks to it, said owner Chris Aamodt. Aamodt’s has been busier this season as families try to find safe outdoor activities.
“When I answer the phones, people are like, ‘What can I do with my kids? They've got to get out of the house!’ And that's the biggest question I’ve had,” he told Nosh Box. “I said, well, unfortunately we're not doing wagon rides and all that, but you're more than welcome to come pick apples. You can walk through the orchard. You can bring a picnic and find your own quiet little spot somewhere with a blanket and spend some time and enjoy it.”
While some pick-your-own operations, including those on the East Coast profiled recently in The Counter, have struggled as a result of COVID-19, two Minnesota PYO owners I spoke with said they were able to adapt: Masks are on, plexiglass shields are up at the registers, and some activities are cancelled, but customers are still coming to pick apples and strawberries.
And the state has allowed them to keep agricultural activities running, plus their normal store and bakery operations. Pine Tree Apple Orchard in White Bear Lake, a suburb of St. Paul, is still putting together a corn maze, although they’re not having a dessert counter, or wagon rides, or music.
During pick-your-own strawberry season, the fields also looked different, said Nancy Jacobson, a member of the family that owns Pine Tree. Pre-COVID, Jacobson said, she’d separate the farm into smaller chunks and create walkways so customers could pick through more methodically. But previously, customers would walk down aisles picking berries from both rows on either side of them. This season, to allow enough distance between groups, the farm skipped over every other row of berries — or more if a family requested.
“It can be a real drag if you're not picking cleanly, and then pretty soon mold starts, and the season is over,” she told Nosh Box. “This year, we didn't do a very good job of picking at all. The good thing is we didn't lose anything, really, but we are all over the place.”
The strawberry fields at Pine Tree Apple Orchard in a typical season. Photo courtesy Pine Tree.
Even though picking was more scattershot than she would have liked, she said she had no plans to send paid staff to harvest missed berries for other purposes.
“That's the beauty and the flaw of a pick-your-own operation, whether it's apples or strawberries,” she said. “It's just left, or fallen on the ground, or stomped by a five year old. It's hard to watch sometimes.”
With 80 percent of Aamodt’s apple orchards reserved for pick-your-own, he needs to bring in supplementary fruit to fill the needs of the apple store and bakery. He’s built partnerships with other local orchards who have the resources to harvest apples on their own farms.
So in this way, pick-your-own becomes less a form of traditional agriculture and more of a value-added draw, of entertainment — although one that, by drawing in customers directly, can support local agricultural producers.
The idea of pick-your-own as entertainment mirrors a broader change in the industry over the past few decades, Aamodt and Jacobson both told me. Both farms have been operational for decades — this is Aamodt’s Apple Farm’s 72nd season — but both introduced pick-your-own in the 1980s. And they each mentioned a second shift since then, away from the actual utility of the fruit and more toward the entertainment of picking it.
Aamodt: “That's kind of when the agritourism started, where people were visiting an orchard not just to get apples and go home and can and make pies. It became more of an entertainment thing for people to do. So that's when we started transitioning into some more of the entertainment stuff too. But — not this year.”
Jacobson: “It started out that people wanted to come and were interested in picking high-quality fruit that they were going to bring home and can and work with and eat. And it has changed over the years to, now, mostly for the fun, and getting some nice food also. … Of course they want to have high-quality fruits, but they’re not going to pick as much or pick as well.”
(Jacobson mentioned Pine Tree Apple Orchard does have some regulars who show up at 8 a.m. and pick carefully, focusing on getting high-quality fruit, but this is certainly no longer the norm.)
As an aside, I personally think it’s fascinating that both farms’ PYO operations started in the ‘80s. If this is indeed a broader historical trend (and not simply an anecdotal coincidence from two geographically and structurally similar farms), I think it would be a fascinating food history project (anyone?) to examine what it was about ‘80s America that sparked folks’ interest in being the ones to pick the fruit themselves. Maybe it was a reaction to the neoliberalization and deregulation of the food industry at that time, or an increasingly sanitized, suburbanized distance from the site of food production?
Or maybe a powerful motivator then, just as it is now, was nostalgia; a way to connect with the past, whether historical or imagined. Just as Aamodt is a third-generation owner, he said, he’s seen third- and fourth-generation customers for whom apple picking is a family tradition.
Jacobson agreed. “It’s nostalgic for people — that they picked with their grandmother and they picked with their mother; now they're taking their children and their grandchildren,” she said. “There's something very, very satisfying about being outside and on your hands and knees harvesting.”
Look at these idyllic apples. Photo courtesy Leungchopan/Fotolia via Minnesota Monthly.
The combination of nostalgia and agricultural education at one physical site is an interesting phenomenon from a theoretical perspective. These farms allow people, especially children, to see up-close how food grows, ostensibly an experiential education in the food system. Both Aamodt’s and Pine Tree offer school tours, and as an elementary schooler in Minnesota I experienced my fair share of apple orchard field trips. But the experiential element is a constructed one, carefully calibrated to fit our societal ideals of nostalgic agrarian simplicity.
What do I mean by this? Just think about the last time you were at a pick-your-own farm, if you’ve ever been to one. Did you see any dead trees? Did you see any immigrant agricultural laborers? Did you see any pesticide-spraying equipment? What you probably did see was, like, a really old barn or tractor. You know, the kind they had back in the olden days, when people knew where their food came from and felt connected to the land and didn’t waste a thing. If only our society could get back to the way people used to value food, you might think. This is the pastoral fantasy, or at least one version of it.
The way we imagine the pastoral, according to the theorist Raymond Williams in The Country and the City, is a response to the unsettling realities of our largely urban lifestyles. The flavor of romanticization at pick-your-own farms is of a countryside that’s a natural cornucopia, an inherently bountiful Eden that’s ours for the picking, free of tension. Which, as any farmer knows, could not be further from the truth of a working landscape. Farming can be hard, unpredictable work.
The critical transformation that separates the pastoral fantasy from agricultural reality, for Williams, is this erasure of labor — the exact thing pick-your-own orchards are designed, by their very nature, to do. Pick-your-own customers are replacing the labor with a leisure activity: Harvesting crops becomes not work but rather something you do to have fun on a day off from work. It’s a safe family activity to do during the pandemic. For the overwhelming majority of U.S. agricultural laborers, of course, this is not the case — especially during COVID-19. Being taught that, for fun, you can sample the typically backbreaking, dangerous work of picking strawberries contributes to the pastoral myth.
So when I think about pick-your-own farms through a solutions lens, the picture remains murky.
The Raymond Williams camp might argue that the pastoral fantasy’s removal of conflict prevents us from moving forward, because it prevents us from imagining new possibilities. If everything seems hunky-dory and we never see the antithesis of it, why bother changing anything? But when we can see the problems for what they are, we can get started on the work of trying to fix them.
At the same time, this removal of tension is the reason there’s more agritourism to pick-your-own orchards than to, say, a lettuce farm in California. The entertainment is what gets people in the door. And I do think there’s value in at least introducing people physically to working farms, whatever that might mean. So I think the question is, how can these models be blended? What does it look like to teach people about where food comes from — in a way they’ll pay attention to — without glossing over the harder realities?
One model I’m interested in is the Oliver H. Kelley Farm, which is run by the Minnesota Historical Society. (If you’re up on your agricultural organizing history, this is the same Oliver Kelley who founded The Grange.) Anyway, they have historical interpreters who dress up in 1850s costumes and harvest vegetables and feed livestock and make soap and whatnot, and a couple years ago they opened a “Farm Lab” with classrooms, a kitchen, and 10 acres of crops and garden plants. Of course, just as much of a constructed reality as pick-your own (did they mention racial politics of 1850s Minnesota? I can’t recall). The Oliver Kelley farm was one of my favorite summer outings as a kid (yes, I’ve always been this way), and although I haven’t been to the Farm Lab yet, I’m intrigued by the way the historical farm interpreters always centered just how much work it takes to farm. They didn’t make it seem easy, and they included kids in tasks like chopping wood and feeding animals. A school field trip here might present a more realistic picture of agriculture than a pick-your-own farm, although perhaps still an imperfect or anachronistic one. A subject for a future Nosh Box, perhaps. Stay tuned.
But for now, as Chris Aamodt told me: “I just keep knocking on wood saying, ‘Well, we've gotten through another day of COVID fall 2020!’”
