Apples wanted: Borthen fruit growers reap a sad harvest

Jörg Stock

Dohna. The apple trees stand in rank and file. Peter Griesbach in a dust-covered off-road vehicle leads the parade. At this time of year, each tree actually bears eighty to a hundred fruits. Now there are only a few at most. Some are already in the crates. Four crates of dessert fruit, four crates of windfall fruit. "A bad deal," says Griesbach. One crate of windfall fruit and ten crates of dessert fruit - that would be the right ratio. The farm lives from the dessert fruit. The fallen fruit is paid for to be picked up. "Nothing more."

The apple is the Germans' favorite fruit. Annual per capita consumption is said to be around 20 kilos. The district of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge satisfies part of this hunger for apples. The area around Borthen is a hotspot for fruit growing. Half a dozen farms, united in the Borthener Obst producer association, harvest around 40,000 tons of apples here every year.

One of these farms is the Griesbach fruit farm. His plantations extend over 2.8 square kilometers of Borthener Kernland, located between the small river Briese and the Spargrund. The family has been in the business for a long time. The senior, who holds a doctorate in agricultural science, was production manager at the state-owned estate. After reunification, Peter, his son, also joined the business, trained as a fruit grower and became a master. Today, he is the boss of two dozen employees and, in normal years, 120 to 130 seasonal workers who harvest his apples.

No work for seasonal workers this time

There is no sign of the army of pickers. Peter Griesbach doesn't need any helpers this year. What needs to be picked is picked by his own employees. Nine people are at work. It is harvest day number 21. 91 tons of apples have been harvested so far. That's not even five percent of the amount that was harvested on the 21st day last year - two thousand tons. "It's not fun," says the fruit grower.

Peter Griesbach's harvest started on August 26, earlier than ever before. The result of extremely early flowering. It made the disaster possible, which happened on a frosty night at the end of April. The thermometer in Borthener Land dropped to minus five degrees, in some places even to minus seven. Only a few blossoms survived. According to the fruit growers' association, which unites almost 60 producers in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, depending on the farm, at most five to 15 percent of a normal apple harvest could be brought in.

Peter Griesbach suspects that his harvest will be at the lower end of this range. He will manage 200 tons if he is lucky, he says, instead of the usual six to seven thousand. A mini-yield that is also of poor quality. As proof, he steps up to a full crate, grabs an apple of the Kanzi variety and cuts it in half with the folding knife he always has to hand.

The halves look and taste delicious: delicately tart, aromatic and tangy. But something is missing: the seeds. The empty shell, from which a channel leads to the uncovered blossom, is the hallmark of frost and the problem of the growers. Fungi can penetrate the fruit through the connection to the outside and spoil it. The shelf life is uncertain. So it's time to sell while you still can.

Peter Griesbach can do this in his farm store. There he can explain to customers that the inner values of the apples are not quite right and that this does not change the taste. The seedless apples are no good as tableware for retailers who want flawless specimens. They go into the pulp. There they only fetch around half to a third of the money paid for first-class fruit, but still a few cents more than the fallen fruit from which the cider is made.

The fruit grower continues on to the Braeburns, a crisp bite with a pleasant sweetness/acidity ratio. New work for the jackknife, but the old picture: hollow casing. "Nothing to do." Things look better with the late bloomer Golden Delicious. Here the blade exposes the seeds. Griesbach is triumphant. "This is what it should look like." So tableware? At best for the birds and deer. Because the trees are practically empty. He estimates that ten kilos fall from each row. Too little fruit for too many kilometers that his pickers would have to walk.

Giving up the fruit hurts Peter Griesbach. But if he pays more for the harvest than he gets for it, he might as well leave them hanging, he says. In fact, he has to if he doesn't want to damage the business. Every day he calculates whether what he is doing is worthwhile. "You lose money very quickly in this business."

Griesbach's company is currently operating at a loss anyway. The boss is firmly counting on receiving the frost aid promised by the Free State. "Otherwise I would have had to take other measures." When asked, he also says what these would have been: "Grubbing up."

Area under apples is shrinking

It has never happened before that a company has given up, says Carmen Stefanie Kaps, who works at the Saxon Fruit Growers' Association runs the business. However, parts of plantations are being turned into fields. "I've heard that from many people." Field crops are easier to manage than fruit growing with its intensive manual labor. The fact is that the apple-growing area in the association has been shrinking for years. "It would be bad if the trend continued downwards," says Kaps.

Does fruit growing have a chance in Borthen? Not with frosts like the one in April, says Olaf Krieghoff. He is a cultivation consultant at Veos, the sales and marketing company in Dohna-Röhrsdorf, which also trades Borthen fruit, among other things. "At the moment, we don't know of any apple variety that would survive such events." However, frost protection irrigation helps relatively well against light frosts.

No water for a protective ice skin

The process involves freezing the flowers. Inside the ice shell, the temperatures do not drop into the lethal range. The problem: you need a lot of water, around 30 cubic meters per hour and hectare. But there is no water in the Borthen area. In the Griesbach company's well, for example, only a good cubic meter comes together within an hour. Olaf Krieghoff talks about other ideas: Building storage basins in the plantations and filling them with service water pipes, for example from the Erzgebirge or the banks of the Elbe.

These pipelines would also help in the fight against drought. Someone would have to build and pay for them. Millions are at stake. The fruit growers couldn't do it alone, says Krieghoff. Politicians would have to be brought on board and admit whether they are interested in fruit growing. And what if not? "Then there will be no more fruit growing here."