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Superfruit survives chips of Kryptonite
Before pure Concord grape juice is made, farmers such as Don Grabemeyer nurture the vines carefully and submit to the whims of nature. But at the end of the season, the superfruit makes superjuice. How much and how sweet is the deciding factor between profit and loss.
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For a superfruit, Concord grapes have their fair share of Achilles' heels.
The metaphor is mixed intentionally, unlike the pure Concord juice processed by Welch's in Lawton, because no single setback has been Kryptonite to the western Michigan juice grape industry. Still, the fruit that charms more anti-oxidant power than any other juice has its blemishes, and they go well beyond the challenges of changing costumes - and consumer preferences - in a phone booth.
If it's not spring frost, it's poor markets. If there isn't early fall frost, there's too much rain. If it's not production cost, it's marketing. If it isn't prices, it's sugar content.
As with a plain-clothes superman, the public doesn't see any of that. It sees the superfruit, squeezed into juice, in all its glory as a defender of the immune system, a savior of failing memory and a luscious drink with an irresistible aroma.
The Grabemeyer brothers know all about the Concord grape's faults, but they think it's super anyway.
Their fourth-generation northwestern Cass County farm is growing better Concords this year than farms a very short distance away, but that's the way it is in the business, said Bill Grabemeyer, who recalls 2006, when spring freezes cost Welch's growers an estimated $12 million.
This year, Concord grape volume and quality is variable, so the crop won't be super. Neither will it be a 90-pound weakling.
"We have some grapes by the lake we expect to lose," Bill said, pointing from a solid and fit 30-year-old vine shaker. "They're very young vines and very sweet. We picked some, but some rows we'll leave, because the quality was not acceptable. And we have some a mile-and-a-half east where we'll only get two tons per acre. The sugar content is only 14.0, and we may lose those too."
It's a real challenge every single year, Bill said, to coax and train 200 acres of superfruit and send them on their way to become superjuice. Some years they leap tall buildings, producing sugar at an ideal content of 16.5 brix. Other years, like this one, growers struggle to meet the mid-15s.
"We've struggled every day for sugar this year," Bill said. "In a normal year, after the first week, we don't have to have someone working in the sugar shack (to measure sugar content) because we know the whole crop will come in over 15 (brix). But this year, we're testing every load."
Testing is essential this year, Bill said, because sugar content is so variable. The produce of the sweet vines he mentioned earlier will be blended in the field with lower sugar content grapes to raise the level of all the daily harvest to a minimum of 15 brix.
"We take a financial penalty below 15," he said.
Among the reasons for the variability and lower sugar content, Don Grabemeyer said, is rain from a Hurricane that dumped 10 to 12 inches on the area during an early-September weekend.
"The ground is totally saturated," Don said. "That swells the berries up and dilutes the sugar. The skins on these berries should be loosening up by now, but with all the water, the skins are still tight. We also had freezes this spring that hurt production, and fall freezes that turn the leaves brown don't do you any good. Green leaves are still working, still making sugar."
Because of all that water, said Terry Holloway, viticulture specialist with Welch's - the brand owned by the National Grape Cooperative - some vineyards have reached 12 tons per acre this year.
"Where there was no frost, yields were excellent," he said. "But where there was frost, they're looking at one to three tons per acre. If the yield gets that low, it's not economical to pick, since the harvesters have to charge a minimum of $200 per acre. But all our grape growers have crop insurance, which has been very important to growers over the past five years or so."
It's not that Concord crops have lacked traditional superpowers in the last five years. Their Achilles' heel has been unreliability. Michigan's Concord crop peaked in 2005 at 66,500 tons, according to the Michigan Agricultural Statistics Service, but then dropped like a Kryptonite rock in 2006 to 15,350 tons. And with prices off in 2007 more than $100 per ton from the peak of $336 in 2006, it's important to be diverse farmers, Don said.
"We need between six and seven tons per acre to break even," he said. "When a freeze comes and knocks that down to three and four tons per acre, that puts you right behind the eight-ball. In the past, grapes have carried our corn, apple and soybean crops here, so now maybe it's time for those crops to foot the bill for the grapes."
Farmers have learned to rely on diversity and crop insurance, because superfruit markets have been on a roller-coaster ride, said Mark Longstroth, District Extension Horticulture and Marketing Agent with Michigan State University Extension.
"We've had spring freezes nearly every other year since 2001," he said. "I remember in 2003, we had a fall freeze on the day most guys started harvesting Concords, and it made the grapes sweeter as they began to lose water. But in 2004, we had a huge crop, and Welch's took a lot of grapes that weren't up to its high quality standards, and they did it because the growers needed them to. But quality went down that year, and Welch's lost some market share due to a multitude of factors."
The cooperative
National Grape Co-op, the grower-owned cooperative, is a key to many Concord growers, even though, as Don Grabemeyer said, its efforts to market pure Concord grape juice based on its health benefits has been a boon for the competition.
"Welch's is the king fish for the grape juice industry, and through the research we've done, we grew the demand for Concord grape juice," he said. "We funded research on nutrition, and we put money into advertising heart health benefits. We spent the money, but the off-brands benefited. When the consumer learns that grape juice is good for him, he'll buy it, no matter the brand. We might be the best, but the others advertise the same benefits."
Because of the research funded by co-op growers, Don said, "Concord grape juice sales increased for 10 straight years, so prices for grapes went up. When that happened, California farmers planted hundreds of thousands of juice grape acres, which drove supply up and prices down. So now, California is taking grapes out by the tens of thousands of acres."
In Michigan's Concord region, however, growers cultivate a more stable crop.
"In Michigan, it takes five years to get to full production," Don said. "In California, it's two or three years. They can jump in and out of crops, and they have more options, like avocadoes or pomegranates."
Michigan's best grape growing sites can only be replaced by peaches for the best results, Holloway said, but there is diversity within the co-op.
"The strength of National Grape is that we have members in Washington, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Michigan," he said, "so if we're short in Michigan, we can bring in Concord juice from other places and bottle it here. Generally, we can meet the company's demands, so that diversity really helps."
However, like most other businesses, fuel costs have hurt National Grape.
"I think in the last five years, diminishing returns to growers are due to energy costs," Don said. "The first year fuel costs hit us hard, we had an additional $38 million in costs for energy, plastic and trucking, on top of the normal 5 to 6 percent annual increase. The next year wasn't much better. We were like an anaconda that swallowed a goat. Those costs have bottomed out, hopefully, this year, but at the prices we're getting now, you have to be a pretty good grower to break even. I hope we've turned the corner."
Holloway is super-optimistic about the future.
"Demand is increasing, we have a local product and a good company," he said. "The business is farmer-owned and we have a relatively reliable market growing in part because Baby Boomers are looking for heart-healthy products. So we hope to add acres in the future."
The future of Concord grapes, the superfruit, is in many ways dependent on the past. There's little need to improve the Concord variety, because it's super, and the Grabemeyer brothers still get pretty good fruit from vines their grandparents planted.
There's a traditional pride there too, evident when Bill speaks about the recent tour group from Jasper County, Missouri, who apparently had a lot of fun inspecting a crop rare as supermen to most of their homesteads.
But it's also evident that the brothers who run the farm - Don, Bill and Dave, have done nothing super-human except persevere and survive.
But when the brothers smell the grape and apple blossoms in the spring, and smell the Concord grape fragrance in the air during harvest, there's nothing that could pull them away from the superfruit, even if it may have a few production blemishes.
"It's been tough mentally this year," Don said. "But when you're picking a decent crop, and you look back and can see exactly what you did that day, it feels good. That's when I can say this is what I'm farming for."
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