Hail during Tuesday's storms damaged hundreds of acres of incipient apples at Forrence Orchards' three largest farms. Co-Owner Mason Forrence estimated that 225 acres at the Stafford Farm on Mannix Road are "completely gone," while about 135 acres at the Valcour Farm experienced marginal damage. "The jury's still out; we've got cuts as big as your little finger," he said of the apples growing on Valcour. And at the main farm on State Route 22, around 423 acres were affected by the punishing bits of ice. "It’s what we call a dirty crop," Forrence said. "What that means is some we won’t harvest, some will go right to sauce, and if the sauce companies won’t take it, it goes to juice. "Every class, the price drops lower and lower. It’s bad." 'QUITE A BLOW' Northern Orchard, also in Peru, also got nailed by the hail. That business lost about 100 acres of apples, said Albert Mulbury, who owns the orchard with his wife, Cindy; son, Jesse; and daughter, Jenna. "It's quite a blow," he said Wednesday. "It's 20 percent of our production." If the damaged apples end up juice, he said, the orchard will earn just an eighth of the value of the fresh-market, high-quality fruit Northern Orchards aims to produce. "We couldn't pay the bills if they all went to juice."   CROP INSURANCE Northern Orchard already suffered at the hand of nature this year, as unseasonable early warmth brought buds out on some trees too soon, only to freeze and die when cold weather returned. Evidence of that is no apples on the lower branches of the trees, he said. "You'd almost call it spring-winter injury." And adding to that the hail damage, he said, "it's a challenging year." Northern Orchard does have crop insurance that pays about 50 percent of losses, Mulbury said. But while that will help, the costs to harvest this year's yield will be the same whether the apples are prime specimens or fit only for juice. And the orchard needs to keep its equipment up-to-date and be able to compete with producers from other prime apple-growing regions. "The food business is so labor intensive," Mulbury said. At present, as Northern is still operating its packing house, shipping out last season's fruit, the orchard employs 40 locals, along with 20 migrant workers from Jamaica.   5 CENTS Forrence and his family felt lucky when they started the spring with fruit growing on the trees, as many orchards in western New York lost theirs to frost. "We thought we were going to have a nice crop." As of Wednesday evening, they were still assessing how much of their fruit had been badly damaged. "We don't have any idea yet but it's a high percentage," Forrence said. He estimated that those apples would be devalued from 40 cents to 5 cents per pound.   VULNERABLE At this time of the year, apples measure an inch to 1 1/2 inches in diameter, Forrence said, "large enough to easily succumb to hail." He said both their honeycrisp crop, a popular variety, and their McIntosh apples were hurt severely. But the type of apple is immaterial, Forrence continued, as every variety is vulnerable to the hail. The Forrences have already made contact with sauce companies, but if the hail went deep enough into the apples, it may not be possible to get rid of bruises, which come through as dark spots in the sauce. "Then it goes to juice, which is the bottom of the barrel. "It's part of the game." Source - www.pressrepublican.com