Miracle Apples

chapter 2

The thing that had driven Kimura crazy was, of course, pesticide-free farming. Even today, there are many specialists who claim that it’s impossible. They believe you cannot harvest apples without using pesticides. For those familiar with the realities of apple growing, this is a foregone conclusion.

This point may be difficult to understand for anyone other than a farmer.

Agriculture today is heavily dependent on agrichemicals. Even those not involved in agriculture know that pesticides are used in virtually all crop cultivation, and that growing crops without the use of chemicals is very limited. However, it’s not really a question of dependence, or farming not being possible without the use of agrichemicals. There are fruits and vegetables out there which, although they may not be all that appealing, were grown without them.

Many years ago pesticides simply did not exist. Farmers in the Edo Period cultivated rice and grew vegetables without using herbicides or pesticides. As far as apples are concerned, they must have been around in Newton’s day, although the apple which led to the discovery of the law of gravity would not have not been treated with pesticides. If apples could not be grown without using pesticides, the fruit which William Tell placed on his son’s head would not have been an apple. There were no pesticide spraying machines in fourteenth century Switzerland. Pesticides are essentially used to help increase crop yields, reduce manual farm work, and to improve the appearance of produce. At least this is the generally held view.

Whilst this may be true, ask an apple producer today and he’ll tell you that this is an oversimplification. It is not merely a case of yields falling if pesticides are not used. Without pesticides, apple orchards would be ruined.

The extent of crop reliance on pesticides depends to a large extent on the type of crop. Research in Japan suggests that if pesticides are not used, apple yields decline by at least 90 per cent due to damage caused by pests. Cucumbers suffer similar damage from the non-use of pesticides. However, fresh seeds can be used every year to grow cucumbers.

Apples are different. Trees subject to major damage which results in a reduction in yield to 10 per cent or less of annual average yield cannot produce blossom the following year. Without blossom, there will of course be no fruit. In other words, if pesticides are not used for two continuous years, the apple crop will almost certainly drop to zero. Unless pesticides are used, this situation cannot be turned around.

There is a big difference between apples today and the apples in William Tell’s and Newton’s time. Here lies the most important reason why apples cannot be grown without pesticides – improvement in varieties. Apples today are a completely different fruit to early apples.

Adam and Eve are supposed to have eaten an apple in the Garden of Eden, but in the Old Testament it simply says it was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What sort of tree the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ was a mystery. The fruit of the unidentified tree being seen as an apple came about because, in both English and German, the word apple originally meant the fruit of a tree.

The fruit of a tree being synonymous with an apple suggests that people have been familiar with apples since the earliest times, and knew about them before they knew about any other fruit. Charred apple was discovered in Switzerland among four thousand year old remains left by the early inhabitants of Europe. Many archaeologists believe this is evidence that apples were cultivated from this time. Apples were a well known fruit in the Roman Empire, the Greek city-states, and in Ancient Egypt. Hence apples have been cultivated by humans for millennia.

Classified as apple species of the genus rosa, the plant is native across a large area from Western Europe to Asia. The prevalent theory holds that the area from which the apple we eat today originated is the Caucasus Mountain range.