After last year’s cataclysmic crop failure,
the future for tarts looks unbelievably sweet.
How can that be? And will this cherry jubilee happen
soon enough to save the North’s beloved orchards?

By Lori Hall Steele
Last April and May, executives at one of the nation’s largest food companies sat in corporate offices and watched moody weather move over Northern Michigan. They looked on as Mother Nature waved her volatile wand over the enchanted landscapes that define Up North—the shorelines, farms and forests, the sweet villages. But in particular, they watched cherries, and they wondered if the delicate fruit would survive.
      The executives saw this: Arctic winds flash-froze tiny cherry buds in April. Then a burst of heat seduced surviving buds into early blossom, sprinkling first white across rolling orchards. They saw weather change its mind again in May. Hot—no, cold. Scattered frosts crystallized new blooms, and frigid air sent sluggish bees home to shiver in hives, starved for pollen.
      By then, seeing essentially all the cherries miscarried, the executives made their decision. They would abandon plans to launch a new cherry product, 8-ounce bottles of cherry juice to sell coast to coast. They just couldn’t do it. Not now. Not with half of the nation’s tart Montmorency cherries growing here, in this charmed, vulnerable landscape.
      The executives couldn’t risk the reputation of their 100-year-old household-name brand on the caprice of Mother Nature. They had wanted to sell the country on the still relatively unsung health benefits of cherries—17 disease-fighting antioxidants, pain-fighting anthocyanins—but they didn’t want arthritis and gout sufferers to get hooked and then find shelves empty, thanks to weather.

      This deal-gone-bust, ironically, portends very good news for the nation’s Cherry Capital.
      Make no mistake: Last year’s cherry crop failed, the worst failure since 1925. Yes, many growers are in dire straits. Sure, developers are handing over fists full of cash for gorgeous orchards, building jumbo homes on ridges overlooking blue bays and a Great Lake. And the big juice deal was a wash.
      In all that, here’s the good news: The biggest thing to hit Northern Michigan since the invention of the pie plate almost happened. Credit goes to Suttons Bay Rotarians who had looked around, saw the cherry industry in malaise—yesterday’s pie market withered, orchards becoming subdivisions—and decided to sell big companies on the health benefits of tarts. “We had a big one on the hook,” says Dick Brant, who headed the effort. Imagine it: demand for an extra 250 million pounds of cherries a year, enough to double the annual U.S. consumption of tarts.
      That a nationwide juice deal almost happened means it could happen. And many, many folks believe it—or something like it—will happen. It’s just a matter of time. Already, consumers “are pulling cherries through the market,” says cherry expert Jim Bardenhagen, by asking stores to carry the shining stars of Cherryland’s future: dark-red tart concentrate, dried cherries and juice, now mostly made by small local operations. One day, cherry juice and snack packs of chewy dried tarts may be found at 7-Elevens from California to Florida. Farmers will want to grow fruit, will plant more trees, because they’ll make money. The region’s residents and tourists—and businesses catering to both—will be able to say one big hallelujah that orchards remain.
      The more urgent question on many minds, though, is this: Will tarts for the nation happen before too many orchards are converted into subdivisions, into grids where the street names commemorate plump red cherries and the way things were?
      Can the industry adapt soon enough?

      TV cameras are rolling at the Grand Traverse Pie Co. on this too-bright winter-white February morning. Inside, Home and Garden Television is filming a segment for its Good Life series. And yes, life is good for owners Denise and Mike Busley, who jumped ship on corporate America in the mid-1990s, leaving sunny California to bake cherry pies in Traverse City. And not just any pies: They would make careful pies, hand-rolled, filled with local fruit, baked that day.
      The downstate Michigan natives wanted a Midwestern life again. And where else is it prettier than Up North? Out in California—as the hit TV show Twin Peaks made pie hip again, as Martha Stewart elevated dough-cutting techniques to high art—there was a pie company doing pretty darned good business. The Busleys were inspired.
      Today, inside, their place smells like paradise, warm things baking, fruit and dough and anticipation. These are the kind of scents that set off happy synapses, and in one second you’ve traveled from a storefront in winter to memories of Mom’s love. Our sense of smell is that powerful, Denise says. People who come to the store almost always come back.
      White-aproned bakers are trimming pie edges on massive silver tables, pretending the Good Life cameras aren’t there. Mike talks about how they now sell 75,000 cherry pies a year, how they’ve opened two more Michigan stores—Brighton, Okemos—and one near Indianapolis. They’re eyeing Detroit and Chicago. This, in a time when sales of pre-made cherry pies and desserts sold by big companies like Sara Lee and Chef Pierre have sputtered.
      Many insiders say the future for cherries lies not in assembly-line desserts, once the industry mainstay, but in high-quality grandma-style pies and designer jams, dried tarts popped into mouths or grilled with pork, and mostly, in the fact that so many arthritis sufferers believe in the curative power of concentrate. “People are not just health-conscious, but quality-conscious,” Mike says, as Good Life cameras move outside. “Look at canned vegetables—that’s all I had growing up. I don’t ever eat them any more.” The moral? Make good things, and the people will buy.
      The Busleys use local, individually quick-frozen cherries, the next best thing to fresh. In this region, “interest in cherries is absolutely piqued right now,” Denise says. Catering to that interest, the pie company began selling cherry salsas, jams and concentrate under its own label.
      When one of Wal-Mart’s Detroit-area pharmacy directors happened into the Brighton pie store last year, he picked up a small bottle of cherry concentrate. He read the accompanying pamphlet about antioxidants, with testimonials about gout receding, joints no longer aching, insomniacs getting a good night’s sleep. He tasted the concentrate, which can be diluted with water to make juice. He was sold on cherries. He called the Busleys: Could he sell their concentrate? The world’s largest discount mega-retailer didn’t exactly fit with the pie company’s small-business, homespun model, but … why not? Today, 18 Detroit-area Wal-Marts are selling 100 cases of Grand Traverse Pie Co. cherry concentrate every week.
      But not alongside orange, apple or grape juice. Rather, cherries are sold with drugs and cures, in the pharmacy section.

      Just how healthy are cherries? Ray Pleva is among those who really, really want to know. That’s how this butcher from Cedar found himself, in late 2001, at a slaughterhouse with his Angus steer, Buzz, and a cooler of dry ice. Pleva would have a mere three minutes after Buzz’s death to pack the steer’s brain on ice. Pleva did it in two. And then the cattle brain was airlifted, like a transplant organ, like a fast-paced Dr. Doolittle version of ER, to the University of Texas for research.
      Pleva had fed Buzz 1.5 pounds of Montmorency tarts a day for nine months. What do cherries do to brains? To human bodies? Disease-fighting antioxidants—vitamins, minerals and other compounds found in food—slow or repair damage to the body’s cells, the cause of many ailments. Since red cherries contain so many, can drinking juice and eating pie slow down cancer and aging and Alzheimer’s? These are questions that researchers—from MSU to Texas to Purdue to Indiana and elsewhere—are hoping to answer. They already know that surveyed cherry growers, who eat six times more cherries than average Americans, reported a lower incidence of cancer and heart conditions. Cherry-related research is scattered and ongoing. Some direct studies await funding, some indirect research—on specific antioxidants—is in progress or coming up.
      So how did a small-town butcher find himself shipping a cow brain to university labs? Let’s flash back, to 1987. Pleva’s teenage daughter, Cindy, had been crowned National Cherry Festival queen, and as she wore her shiny tiara and satin sash, smiled big and parade-waved to crowds, she sensed trouble in Cherryland.
      Growers everywhere were working one or two outside jobs, just to keep their farms. A decade before, they’d planted and planted Montmorency trees to feed the public’s taste for cherry pies. Growers earned 29 cents, then 44 cents, then 46 cents a pound. When all those new acres began abundantly producing, however, lifestyles were changing. People were too busy to make pie, too health-oriented to buy loads of desserts. Farmers began shaking cherries on the ground to reduce the supply and stabilize the price, but the price continued to fall. In 1987, the year Cindy Pleva wore her rhinestone crown, cherry farmers received 7.5 cents a pound.
      One night at the Pleva’s dinner table, the reigning Cherry Queen said, “Dad, we need to do something to help.” And cherry-pecan sausage was born. The idea would eventually land Ray and Cindy on Oprah and CNN, talking about cherry country, about how the fruit tenderizes meat, acts as a natural preservative, tastes great. Schoolchildren in 17 states now eat cherry burgers for lunch, and U.S. soldiers soon may be eating cherry burgers. Pleva recently opened a Japan office, and he’s eyeing Canada, Mexico.
      When Pleva rolled out cherry-pecan sausage, he noticed something. Customers kept mentioning how fabulous they felt. Their joints weren’t aching. They could easily digest cherry-meats. “It started a little each day,” Pleva says. “I kept putting pieces together.” He contacted two local doctors to say “hey—this is what’s happening”—then he called an MSU researcher. For five years, he asked researchers to put cherries under the microscope, and then he rounded up the cash for it to happen.
      MSU’s 1998 findings on cherries—identifying the antioxidants—made national headlines. “The day when doctors say—‘Take cherries and call me in the morning’—may not be far off,” Newsweek wrote. Decades before, Texas A&M research suggested cherries possessed healthy properties. The news faded. This time was different. The timing was right for tarts. By the late-1990s, the nation had latched onto natural cures and preventatives, herbal teas, echinacea and St. John’s wort.
      Farmers here and there, adapting to public wants, grabbed the news and began making and selling concentrate, juice and dried cherries, sometimes gaining devoted followings from faraway folks who craved the elixir for their bones, a good night’s sleep, headaches. Cherry research continued. And lots of cherry activity began: product development—pills, powders, pastes—and talk of patents, licensing. Marketing efforts, and hush-hush corporate testing on animals. There were politics—why is Amway sitting on the license for a cherry aspirin?—and everyone had a different idea about how to capitalize on the discovery, how to help the cherry industry: boost demand, lower supply, keep cherries a high-end regional specialty, make the whole nation want cherries. There was reasonable hope for stable prices, because those overplanted Montmorency trees were past their peak, finally, after 30 years, meaning supply would taper off by 2005 or 2010.

      Despite the hopes following MSU’s antioxidant discovery, farmers still weren’t, and aren’t, making much more than a dime or two per pound. There was debate and discontent over efforts to stabilize tart supplies and prices. A grower-approved, government-backed order capped output in robust years, and prices were agreed upon by a collective of processors. Cherries still rotted on the ground, but there were enough reserves to meet most of last year’s shortage (many, however, were shipped in from Poland).
      Meanwhile, gorgeous homes kept being built in gorgeous orchards. Conservancies worked quietly to help preserve pretty farms using development-right purchase programs. Residents in one cherry-growing mecca, Old Mission Township, ponied up tax dollars for the cause. There still wasn’t enough money. Not even close. Environmentalists championed land preservation, governments debated how it could happen, and business people—aware of this region’s dependence not only on agriculture, but also on landscape-reliant tourism—pooled their resources and went for what they saw as the real solution: A new national market for cherries.
      Members of the Suttons Bay Rotary Club’s Cherry Initiative, leveraging impressive business connections, in 1999 started knocking on corporate doors and handing out bowls of cherries. If tarts had a presence outside five Upper Midwest states, in places like Kansas and Georgia, Rotarians reasoned, cherry farmers could get prices they needed to survive, and the land would be saved. Members talked about antioxidants to people at Kellogg’s, General Mills, ConAgra Foods. Cereal makers said cherries were too pricey to be The New Raisin—10 times the cost, thanks largely to pits. Two large corporations decided to pass on concentrate.
      What about 8-ounce bottles of juice? “We hit paydirt on that,” says Brant. Tarts had found a champion. The company—whose name remains secret—not only locked onto the juice concept, it also conducted animal trials that proved tarts reduce inflammation and pain. It was “the first element of science” beyond MSU’s antioxidant revelation, Brant says, and human trials were planned. The company eventually would need 250 million pounds of cherries a year, and that’s if cherries took over only 1 percent of the lucrative juice market.
      When last year’s orchards began resembling barren forests, cherries’ new champion was “horrified,” Brant says. Remember, half the nation’s tarts are grown right here, Up North. The company shelved the deal. The Rotarians disbanded, figuring big companies would need time to forget all about that agricultural fluke, crop failure.
      During last year’s harvest, Northern Michigan’s 320-some tart cherry farms produced 1 million pounds, compared to an average of 145 million pounds. Crop failure destabilized an unknown number of pending product deals, including cherry ice cream in Asia.
      Which is really kind of baffling, according to Bardenhagen, who heads MSU Extension’s Leelanau County office, because cherries haven’t had such a bad year in eight decades. Odds of a repeat performance are slim. Besides, there was enough reserved fruit to provide ingredients for almost a year’s worth of pies, juices and salsas. Growers could have guaranteed an extra 250 million-pound output within several years—by reserving oversupply, by planting more trees.

      Meanwhile, as deals fell apart, a nationally renowned researcher in Texas named Dr. Russel Reiter was thinking about Buzz’s brain and its link to his specialty: melatonin, one of the antioxidants in cherries. It’s exciting, he says, because clinical trials may soon reveal whether melatonin inhibits prostate and ovarian cancer cells. “The implication of course,” he says, “is that eating cherries may in fact reduce the growth of these specific cancers.”
      Reiter talks calmly by phone about cherries and science, about how bright the future is for tarts — dried, juiced, whatever form. The most thrilling thing about antioxidants is synergy. Antioxidants help each other work better. “Two plus two doesn’t equal four anymore,” Reiter says. “Two plus two equals six.” Which begs the question: What’s the value of 17 antioxidants?

      Cherries are a “a nutty industry,” says Bob Sutherland. “Right now, the industry is surviving on committed farmers that love what they’re doing. It’s in their blood.” Sutherland is in his office at Cherry Republic in Glen Arbor—the slogan is “Life, Liberty, Beaches & Pie”— a place that brokers not only exuberant cherry products (BoomChuggaLugga cherry soda, BoomChunka cherry cookies) but also the spirit of Up North. There are, Sutherland points out, 150-some national parks. But there is only one Cherry Capital. No place else on earth is quite like this region, geographically, or in essence. To help safeguard Northern Michigan, Sutherland donates 1 percent of profits to farmland preservation.
      Sutherland doesn’t like to talk about supply and demand for cherries—how if each U.S. citizen would eat just 20 or 100 more cherries a year, everything would be swell.
      Instead, he likes to talk about how fun cherries are—especially the pit-spitting part. Whether dipped in dark chocolate, dried for a moist chew, or chutneyed—cherries are a blast. They tang in your mouth. And they’re pretty in drinks. Innocent and darling as a Shirley Temple. Old-school and manly as a Manhattan.
      Hold it: Those drink cherries are maraschinos. Don’t be fooled by them. Sutherland’s working to erase maraschinos from memories as the thing people picture when they think cherry. Forget bleached and flavored cherries, and go for the real thing. Montmorency tarts. Sutherland spends $50,000 a year on samples, to get people tasting real cherries.
      And remember the pie company’s quality strategy? Sutherland and others have a similar marketing theory: Make great cherry products, and people will buy them. Don’t sniffle about poor per-pound prices or the plight of farmers; don’t dwell on negatives. Sutherland’s think-fun, cheery-cherry tack has worked: 10 years after launching his company, he sells products containing about 1 million pounds of cherries.

      Successful farming—cherries, other commodities—is all about adaptation. About following rhythms of public taste, anticipating the sky’s mood, fine-tuning the output of soil and trees. Area farmers say, yes, they keep planting and harvesting because it’s in their blood. Many are the second or fourth generation to work the same soil. They go out in the morning and look up; they plant and prune. Many also are adapting to the 21st century in ways their grandfathers never envisioned: by becoming marketers and manufacturers, by making and selling products themselves.
      Ten years ago, cherry grower Richard Friske and his family gathered in their small farm market’s walk-in freezer to hand-package 24-ounce frozen cherries to sell roadside. The family, like others, was struggling. Growers from Manistee to Charlevoix were unsure how to make payments on pricey shakers and tractors, how to pay for new trees, spray. The Friskes decided to get creative and hit on the icebox: No one was really selling frozen cherries for home bakers. Sure, there were 40-pound restaurant-size bags of frozen cherries. But canned tarts were pretty much the only cherries available for those who wanted to bake a cobbler out of season.
      Consumers liked Friske’s product. They wanted the next best thing to fresh—pretty red frozen tarts. “Sure enough, if you get a nice quality cherry out there, it will sell,” Richard Friske says. The family contacted supermarkets, and they now sell not only frozen cherries, but also juice at places like Meijer, Spartan and Kroger stores in Michigan and bordering states. Richard Friske is hopeful. In fact, he says, “The sky’s the limit” for the frozen-tart operation. And for cherries in general. “This health benefits thing has really revitalized cherry growers,” he says. “It hasn’t had the big dramatic financial impact yet. But everybody’s optimistic that that’s coming.”
      Yes, everyone agrees: Commodities are a charged, erratic business. Cherries slide up and down trajectories of weather, of public mood over breakfast. Supply cha-chas with demand as dreamers devise new products, marketers plan seductions, scientists hunt natural magic, and experts divine the future. Farmers stand alone in orchards trying to decipher it all. What should they believe about cherries? How long can they hold out? Everybody works for that fine balance—the one that keeps Up North’s trees blooming—the point of equilibrium: A Quarter a Pound. Meanwhile, Mother Nature can smile, tip her head back and laugh, and scatter frost across new blossoms, making bees go catatonic.

      And once again, it is nearing spring. Steve Kalchik is driving his new four-wheel-drive truck past his young Montmorency trees. Snow is everywhere, diamond-shiny, and rows and rows of bare ruddy-barked trees make patterns up hills. On branch tips, tiny buds are sleeping. Kalchik eyes his trees and thinks out loud, “Oh my god, I’ve got to start pruning pretty soon.” Yes, last year was tough. But the Kalchiks are not new to this. Steve is the fourth generation to farm this Leelanau County land. There were years of potatoes, peas, cattle, field crops. Farmers adapt. It’s that simple. He’s starting to plant new tart varieties—Danubes, Balatons—to tap high-end markets, to stagger harvest times.
      Kalchik’s property bumps up against St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church and its Bohemian cemetery, where ornate silvery crosses gleam in winter sun. His people are buried here, where the roads and headstones bear the same names: Kalchik, Jelinek. Czech immigrants came here in the 1860s, and they began farming. And they just kept doing it. Kalchik knows of a few farmers who got tired of just scraping by and sold out, but not very many. He’d rather talk about what’s coming up: “Everyone’s looking for a good year this year.”
      As Kalchik speaks, his neighbor Martin G. Jelinek is out pruning trees on this icy, bright Tuesday. Like others, he’s convinced that cherry’s health benefits will save the day. Either way, he’s committed. Farming is his life. It’s his lifestyle: He savors the independence. He cherishes the challenge. There is satisfaction in acting as a steward to the land, in feeding people healthy food. He accepts that there really is only one thing that cannot be controlled: Mother Nature. And farmers know how to adapt even to that.
      “You just have to have a lot of faith,” he says. “And farmers do have a lot of faith.”

Published in Traverse magazine..