Story by Matt Milkovich -(Good Fruit Growers Magazine)

Photo Credit: TJ Mullinax

When Tom and Alison DeMarree took over the family orchard in Williamson, New York, in the late 1980s, it was all processing blocks with 40 trees to the acre. A few decades later, 90 percent of the farm focuses on fresh — and it’s moving toward 100 percent fresh under the supervision of their daughter, Kristen DeMarree. 

Such a comprehensive transition from processing to fresh was a “remarkable achievement,” requiring a lot of foresight, work and investment, said Cornell University horticulture professor Terence Robinson. 

“They’re top-notch growers,” Robinson said. “They were one of the first to buy into precision crop load management.”

If you ask people in the apple industry, you’ll learn that the DeMarrees have always been ahead of the curve, whether it’s testing new varieties, adopting orchard mechanization and digital technology or learning from and teaching other growers. For these reasons and more, the Good Fruit Grower advisory board named the DeMarrees the 2025 Good Fruit Growers of the Year. 

“They’re great people,” said Mike Wittenbach, Michigan grower and member of the advisory board that chose the DeMarrees. “They’re an asset to the whole U.S. industry.”

Rod Farrow, fellow New York grower and the 2020 Good Fruit Grower of the Year, said Tom and Alison have been at the forefront of high-density fresh orchards and are always willing to share what they’ve learned. 

“They’ve given so much back to the industry,” Farrow said. “They thoroughly deserve the recognition.”

Transition

When Tom and Alison began running the farm after Tom’s father, Donald DeMarree, they questioned their future in the processing market. Fresh apples offered more flexibility and independence. They could choose who to sell to, instead of being tied to a single buyer. 

“We knew we had to make changes or not stay in business, so we decided to risk it all,” Alison said. “We never hesitated to take a block out, and we never regretted it. You can’t grow stuff you’re losing money on.”

They had data to back up the decision, thanks to Alison’s job as a farm business management specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension. 

“I was running budgets for Cornell, comparing planting systems,” she said. “We looked at the results and said, ‘We either fully commit to this or get out.’”

So, they started pushing out old blocks and putting in new ones, a process that continues to this day. Current plantings are spaced 2 or 2.5 feet by 12 feet, 1,500 to 1,800 trees per acre. They keep the rows at 12 feet to make space for machinery. They started using mobile platforms 25 years ago for thinning, trimming and other nonharvest tasks.

They quickly learned that getting workers off the ground and onto moving platforms dramatically improved efficiency. Six workers on a platform do the same amount of work as eight or nine workers using ladders. These days, most of their harvesting happens on four Huron Fruit Systems platforms and two Munckhof Pluk-O-Traks.

High-cost Honeycrisp

“Everything now is about efficiency and not wasting time,” Alison said. The DeMarrees hire up to 13 H-2A workers for spring tasks and 39 for harvest. New York state’s agricultural overtime threshold is gradually dropping to 40 hours per week by 2032, so they’re building more housing in anticipation of hiring more workers, Kristen said.  They grow 200 acres of apples and don’t plan any large-scale expansion beyond that. 

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“The work I did on projections basically showed that if you grow a high-quality apple and get a good return, you don’t need a 500-acre farm,” Alison said. 

The search for high-quality apples put the DeMarrees on the forefront of testing new varieties, Wittenbach said. 

Minneiska (marketed as SweeTango) has been a profitable club variety for them. They have trial plots of other managed and open varieties, including apples from the Midwest Apple Improvement Association, or MAIA. New varieties don’t always pay off. It takes years to figure out an apple’s strengths and weaknesses, and you can’t predict how consumers will react to it, Alison said.  “We’re always willing to try something new,” Tom said. “If something doesn’t work, we’re not afraid to admit a mistake and either graft it over or take it out.”

Technology

When Kristen came back to the family farm a few years ago, one of her first projects was to digitize the drip irrigation system. Turning manual irrigation valves on and off took up to 30 labor hours per week.  “It was so inefficient,” she said. “I thought there has to be a better way.”

She adopted Hunter Irrigation software to schedule irrigation in 2023. She can turn water off and on by block using Bluetooth technology, as long as she’s within 50 feet of a valve. The new system halved their irrigation costs in the first year.  They use Croptracker software to track harvest, delivery and shipping records. 

“We used to reconcile by hand, which took weeks,” Kristen said. “With this, we went from two weeks to reconcile to half a day.”

They’re trialing Orchard Robotics cameras and Aurea Imaging drones to aid precision crop load management. Agri-Trak software tracks worker hours, she said. When considering new technology, Kristen asks herself: What problem is this solving? Can I solve it with a pen and paper, or do I need technology to fix it?  “I don’t want to just adopt new technology for the sake of it,” she said. Adopting new technology also requires patience. “You have to give it a couple of years to work out the kinks,” Kristen said. “If you try it and have problems and give up, you’re never going to get anywhere.”

Patience paid off with Extenday, the reflective fabric they use to redden apples. They’ve spent the past few years figuring out how to cost-effectively deploy it; rolling it out, and especially rolling it back up, takes a lot of labor. But even with labor and material costs added in, Extenday can net them an additional $1,800 per acre, even on varieties like Gala.  “Far and away, it pays off,” Kristen said. “It’s just trying to figure out how to use it efficiently.”