Flamm Orchards looking for resiliency

COBDEN, Ill. — Flamm brothers Jeff and Mike are direct to the point about their prospects at their Union County orchard last season.

“Last year was hands down the worst year I’ve ever had,” said Jeff, with Mike commenting the same thing minutes later. “Everything we tried just went down the tube.”

That comment covered their strawberries, peaches, cucumbers and squash.

“Then we got hit with the dicamba. What we thought was going to be a pretty good apple crop just fizzled at the end and we ended up with less than half a crop,” he continued.

For an orchard in operation since 1888 and the fifth-generation brothers working there since the 1980s, they’ve seen their share of the farming ups and downs, but never to this extent.

They believe upwards of 80 percent of their apple crop was lost after the leaves on the tops and sides of their apple trees browned and fell off. The fruit on their apple trees also quit growing.

“As apples get ready in the last six weeks, there’s a tremendous amount of photosynthesis that produces that new growth in the upper part of the tree, and that sends energy back to the fruit and makes the apple grow. That didn’t happen,” Jeff said.

The trees became dry and brittle, Mike explained.

“Actually, the trees were defoliating before we even started harvest. The apples only got to 2- or 2 1/4-inch and they just stopped. They quit growing, the sugar levels didn’t rise in them like they should have and we were really late getting started because we were waiting on the sugars to get up.”

The Flamms believe an untimely temperature inversion in June occurred in “The Bottoms” along the Mississippi River where more soybeans than usual had been planted and protected with dicamba-related products.

Jeff said the herbicide stayed volatile for four to five days after application and was “lifted up to the ceiling” by the sudden temperature change and then was blown roughly 20 miles when it hit the bluff.

“You can see where the cloud drifted from the south in the woods and the white oaks and then hit our trees,” Jeff said, with Mike adding that “most people don’t know what to look for. I think there are people who didn’t know what was wrong but their tomato plants were dying in their yard. They just don’t know what it is.”

Jeff emphasized that they are not blaming any farmers.

“They might have been following that label right to the letter. I’m not accusing anyone of doing anything intentional or illegal,” he stressed.

“Dicamba has the ability to be applied and lie there for three, four, five days and still volatize. So, they can spray today and four days down the road, you get the right kind of conditions and it gets really hot and there’s an inversion, up it goes, hits the ceiling and away it goes. It gets up here to the hills and it starts falling out. And that’s what I think happened.”

The Flamms made the requisite reports and notices to the Illinois Department of Agriculture and their insurance companies. The farm business also has joined a larger legal suit against manufacturer Monsanto/Bayer.

But, as other specialty crop growers have experienced, the Flamms said the proof of actual dicamba-related damage was fleeting because of the chemical compound’s ephemeral nature and the difficulty to secure tissue samples before the chemical completely breaks down.

With no proof, there’s no blame and the orchard has had to cope with its losses to date on its own.

“I don’t know how you can put a dollar figure on it. I don’t know how you can say ever if you waited 10 to 15 years that this caused this to happen. I just don’t know,” Mike said.

What’s more, no one has been able to advise them about what kind of long-term damage may have occurred to their perennial trees. They don’t know how their apple trees will produce, if at all, this year or for the balance rest of the trees’ 20 to 25 fruit-bearing years.

“There are lots of unanswered questions out there for us. If we had 40 acres of soybeans, we would just plow them under and start over the next season,” Jeff said. “But that’s not the nature of these trees. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that.”

They are bracing for more trees to die. They lost as many as 700 peach trees and 250 acres of apple trees — roughly 35,000 trees — were affects.

Complicating the damage is the perennial nature of the fruit trees. While they produce fruit for two decades or more, apple trees, for example, start forming buds in the tree’s interior cells the year before the buds break and mature into the fruit the following year.

Besides that calculation, it takes a newly transplanted peach or apple tree three or four before it bears marketable fruit and doesn’t hit peak production until year seven or eight. They also noted that there’s currently a three-year wait for new tree stock.

“That’s 10 years before we replace one of those trees,” Jeff said.

The Flamms spent the winter reviewing the 2018 season as they are making plans to launch their 2019 year. Final arrangements are made for arrival of immigrant labor by early April, a list is compiled of immediate work tasks and locations and orders placed for supplies.

They also know that their strawberry crop will be stunted because of disease pressure last fall and despite their difficulties with low vegetable pricing last season, they will continue their diversification program and add bell peppers into their wholesale vegetable mix this season.

The orchard also now appears in the Drift Watch directory, a national website listing sensitive crop areas that Illinois spray applicators are now required to visit before applying any dicamba-related products.

Despite the uncertainty and as sure as the spring is here, the Flamms have their plan for the new year and they continue moving forward for their next generation and 150 staff who work there. They’ve also ordered 1,000 fruit trees to plant in 2021.

“It’s been tough,” Mike said. “This is the first time in my life that we’ve not been able to pay off our operating loan from last year. So we’re going into this year carrying a debt load and we’ve got to get this crop raised. We’re in a tough spot, I’m not going to kid anybody.”