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Naumes will uproot 800 acres The orchards no longer pull their weight By DAVID PRESZLER Questions and answers Why are the trees being removed? The 800 acres of doomed orchards -- 400 acres each this year and next -- produce lower yields and smaller fruit, for which the market is weak. Worldwide overproduction of apples and pears is also driving the decision, Naumes officials say. What will happen to the land? Naumes officials say they haven't decided. It's zoned for farm use. What about jobs? No permanent jobs will be lost in the Rogue Valley, Naumes officials say. Four hundred acres of the Rogue Valley's pear and apple orchards have seen their last harvest. Naumes Inc. will begin removing the trees -- including the 100-acre Mira Vista pear orchard east of the intersection of Delta Waters and Foothills Road -- next week, company officials said Thursday. The valley's largest grower said the 400 acres of trees to be pulled this fall will be followed by another 400 next year. "Sadly, over time, our expectations are that all our apples will be removed and half the pear acreage will be eliminated," said chief executive Mike Naumes. The company has about 100 acres of apples in the valley and 2,500 acres of pears. Between its holdings in Oregon, California and Washington, the company has about 7,000 acres of orchards and plans to remain a major player in the fruit growing industry. But it simply doesn't make business sense to keep these particular Rogue Valley orchards in production, Naumes said. He said there's worldwide overproduction of apples and pears, driving down prices as costs rise and regulation increases. "We see a bleak future for production agriculture in general and especially in the Rogue Valley," he said. "After five years of significant losses here, it's time to stop the bleeding. "We've tried everything from high-tech intensive farming to innovative marketing and we keep going backwards." "It's very emotional," said Tony Freytag, the company's marketing director. "It's one of those cruel realizations that you are better off doing nothing there than losing a couple thousand dollars an acre each year." Freytag said no permanent jobs in the Rogue Valley will be lost. The trees are being removed rather than just left untended so the orchards won't become a haven for pests that could attack other, producing orchards. The company hasn't decided what will become of the orchard land, Freytag said. It is zoned for exclusive farm use, which prevents nonagricultural development without a zone change or annexation. In addition to the Mira Vista orchard, the company will remove another entire orchard off Antelope Road, portions of the old Medford Pear orchard off North Phoenix Road, and smaller pieces of other orchards. "We've already started removing irrigation equipment," Freytag said, noting that the harvest on those orchards finished up in the past few days. Yields and fruit size on those orchards have been shrinking and the market has not been strong for smaller fruit, he said. "When you could sell everything that you could grow, you could make money on it," he said. "But now your markets are very limited." Because production is higher, buyers are more specific about the size and quality of fruit they'll but. Smaller, lower-quality fruit is often sold as cull fruit to be made into juice concentrate. Cull fruit used to bring $110 to $120 a ton, Freytag said, but $40 a ton is now considered good. So Naumes plans to focus on orchards where it can grow the fruit for which the market is strongest. "What we are doing is taking the most productive and the highest-yielding orchards," he said. "We are only going to farm the best." The cutbacks are expected to reduce the company's raw tonnage by about 15 percent, but Freytag says it won't significantly reduce the tonnage that can be sold for a good price. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA