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| Guests of honor at a recent Ayer-Harvard-Shirley Rotary Club meeting are (left to right) Donald Morris, Desmond Sappleton, Bruce Carlson, Eustace Francis, LaSalle Parks, Orthniel Downs, Errol Brown, and Frank Carlson. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz) |
On a blustery December evening, a group of six soft-spoken Jamaicans clustered together in a crowded function room at the Bull Run Restaurant in Shirley. Looking a bit self-conscious as the guests of honor amidst a sea of New England Rotarians, the group shared a meal with their employers Bruce and Franklyn—better known as Frank—Carlson.
Reverse snow birds, the men travel more than 1,500 miles each autumn to Carlson Orchards on Oak Hill Road in Harvard, where they work until the following March. Two of the men, Donald Morris and Eustace Francis, have wintered over in Carlson’s dormitory for the last 37 years—a long-term relationship rare in today’s workforce.
“These fellows work hard and we’re blessed to have them,” said Frank Carlson, the guest speaker at the Rotary Club of Ayer, Harvard, and Shirley. “They come to work happy and work until the work is done. I don’t think we would be in business without them.”
Coming from the balmy Caribbean to a New England winter can’t be easy for these men, who farm and work construction when at home. But the financial benefit outweighs the cost—even that of being separated from family for seven months of the year. Each week the men unfailingly send income home to their families via Western Union.
Keeping the work relationship going is not without its headaches. Each year the Carlsons have to justify to the government that there are not enough local workers willing to put in the long hours and hard labor required of orchard work. Once the yearly documentation has been completed, the business can legally employ the Jamaicans under the Labor Department’s H-2A program.
Farming in New England has always been a daunting task. Lately, rising real estate prices and tax burdens have taken a toll on New England apple orchards. Many orchards running at small margins eventually sell out to developers, who value their easily cleared land.
Another threat to local orchards is the ever-increasing deer population, which prompted the Carlsons to install 3.5 miles of 8-foot-high deer fencing this past summer. ”The deer don’t eat the fruit,” explained Carlson, “but they eat the buds, thus damaging apple growth on the lower limbs of the trees. Though it will take a full three years to recover from damage done by deer in past years,” Carlson said, “it’s nice to see the deer on the outside of the fence looking in.”
Then there are the whimsical tastes of consumers. Americans are not the only people super-sizing their appetites. Customers in the United Kingdom who used to gobble down 2¼-inch Macintosh now prefer a heftier 2¾-inch apple, leaving the smaller apples for cider production.
Carlson described their newest threat as China’s potential entry into the fresh apple market. “Several years ago, China flooded the world market with frozen apple juice concentrate, which caused prices to plummet, bankrupting orchards worldwide,” Carlson said. “These are not large corporate farms, but small two- to three-acre farms that collectively impact world markets,” he added. He said that the Chinese government is currently trying to loosen the sanitary standards imposed on fresh apples exported to the U.S. “My biggest fear is that our government will not protect us [farmers] from this threat and will sell us down the river.”
The late Walter and Eleanor Carlson bought the hilltop orchards in the 1940s. Run now by their sons Frank, Bruce, and Robert, and worked by the Jamaican crew, the orchards continue to roll with the changing marketplace. Frank Carlson, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts’s Stockbridge school, also attributes the orchards’ success to diversifying over the past 30 years. Apple trees cover only two-thirds of the land they did at the height of the orchards, but the Carlsons now cultivate peaches, nectarines, blueberries, and raspberries and are even getting into Asian pears.
The Jamaican workers are kept busy: Carlson Orchards is the largest cider producer in New England, one of few in the region that invested in the costly pasteurization equipment required by cider wholesalers to prevent food-borne illness such as E. coli. What used to be seasonal work has turned into year-round work. The family holds contracts with grocery chains ranging from Whole Foods to Market Basket. The grocers want to be able to provide cider to their customers year-round, so cider pressing now stretches well into the summer.
Carlson described their base apple, the Macintosh, as “one of the most tasty, aromatic apples you can find.” He explained that you can make cider from straight McIntosh, but they usually create a blended apple cider based on their macs and what is available from other orchards. In autumn, the crews press 6,000 gallons of cider a day, though by the following August, dwindling supplies of apples may be pressed only once a week.
Carlson is quick to credit the contribution of his Jamaican workers and it appears that the respect between the workers and the Carlsons is a two-way street. When asked about his employment at Carlson Orchards, Orthneil Brown, hired two years ago on the recommendation of a orchardist in Epping, N.H., readily summed up his employer: “Frank Carlson is a good man to work for.”