Con Traas can tell you a lot about apples.
He can tell you which types are best for eating, which for cooking, which for cider. He can tell you the lineage of apple varieties, ancient and modern. He can describe different diseases of the apple tree and how a farmer can best navigate the tricky algebra of balancing flavour, disease resistance and the myriad other factors that go into deciding which varieties to plant. He can tell you which apples are best at what time of year, why buying red apples can be tricky, and why Irish apples are so juicy.
The one thing Traas can’t tell you is why, despite the apple’s popularity and millenniums-long history in Ireland, today we import nearly all of the apples eaten here. Some 95 per cent of apples eaten in Ireland were grown elsewhere.
Traas is a second-generation apple farmer and owner of The Apple Farm near Cahir, Co Tipperary, a 40-acre orchard and farm shop. He’s also chairman of the Irish Apple Growers Association and teaches horticulture and biology at the University of Limerick.
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Apples have been eaten in Ireland probably for as long as there have been people to eat them. Apple pips thousands of years old have turned up in Neolithic crannógs, but those were probably from small, sour native crabapples. Larger, sweeter eating apples probably arrived about 1,000 years ago after surviving a long evolutionary trek from their central Asian home.
Today Traas estimates there are only 35 full-time commercial apple growers in Ireland, down from 50 in 2017. And 40 per cent of all the apples grown here are Bramley cooking apples.
The decline in Irish apple orchards began in 1973, Traas says, when the Republic and the UK joined the European Economic Community – now the EU – and the tariffs on imported fruit were lifted.
That was not long after Traas’s father and mother emigrated to Ireland from their native Netherlands, where their families had been fruit farmers for generations. With land hard to come by there, in 1967, they bought a farm that already had a small orchard in the Tipperary townland of Moorstown.
Starting from just seven acres of apples, today The Apple Farm has grown to 40 acres producing 45 varieties.
In a double whammy, the introduction of cheaper European apples in the early 1970s coincided with the growth of supermarket chains that preferred to buy fruit in large quantities. Today roughly 90 per cent of fresh apple sales in Ireland go through those huge markets. That makes it difficult for smaller orchards to survive.
To hold their own, Traas’s parents opened a farm stand in the 1970s, selling directly to customers. A local landmark, it still operates from the same barn, selling own-grown apples, strawberries, raspberries, cherries and plums as well as apple juice, cider, vinegar and jams and jellies. And there is also a camping and caravan park.
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This diversification has paid off. Traas says fresh apple sales account for only about 40 per cent of The Apple Farm’s revenue, with about half of those sold direct at the farm stand and half sold through other shops, including Dunnes Stores. Apple juice is a key product, making up about half of total revenue (though it is more complicated to make and involves more expense).
While it’s safe to say that for most shoppers, apples are apples, in reality there is an almost uncountable number of varieties farmers can choose from.
The Apple Farm’s varietal line-up is in steady shuffle as Traas searches for varieties to fill certain niches. Some apples ripen at different times than others. Some are more resistant to common diseases than others. And some apples are more consistently productive than others.
But Traas says while those considerations are important, the bottom line has to be flavour.
“Disease resistance, bearing, all of those are important factors,” Traas says. “But none of that is as important as customer acceptability. As a farmer, your first thought has to be, ‘How is it going to sell to customers?’”
So why are deep red apples so often disappointing? Colour is a key indicator of ripeness in many varieties, but to take advantage of that, plant breeders have developed apples that redden without full ripening. So we shoppers are left to guess.
And the big question: why are apples grown in Ireland so juicy? It’s down to the weather, but not in the way you might think. It’s not all that rain that makes Irish apples so juicy, Traas says, but our cool spring weather.
“The first eight weeks after flowering is when apples create all the number of cells that they’re going to have for the rest of the year,” he says. “The rest of apple size is basically just those cells expanding.
“When the weather is warmer during that time, the apple develops more cells. When it’s cool, like it is here, you get fewer cells. If you have twice the number of cells in an apple of the same size, each cell is going to be smaller and won’t give up the juice as freely. So Irish apples tend to be quite juicy.”
