FRUIT LEGACY
Rey Allred, elder statesman of the fruit bench.

By Steven Rosenberg

In the mid-1990s, I ended up at a meeting of Utah heirloom apple growers. These folks were hobbyist growers from Northern Utah who came together each autumn to share and exchange produce and stories and expertise. They’d gather after hours at the offices of Fetzer’s Architectural Woodworking in Salt Lake City to taste, talk, make notes, ask questions and debate.

What variety would be best for cider making? Pie baking? Applesauce? There was talk of new trees to plant, new rootstocks and bud wood to graft onto them. And it was here – among these devoted producers – that I first started hearing about Rey Allred.

Rey Allred

Back then, Rey Allred was a bit of mythical figure to me, the kind of farmer whose magic touch and depth of knowledge makes the whole community a better place to live, and eat. What he grew was usually the gold standard against which the other crops would be measured. And in those hobbyist meetings, it seemed that whenever there was a debate about a particular variety, Robert Fetzer would chime in about “what Rey Allred would have to say.”

Finally, after more than five seasons of hearing about Rey, I decided I had to meet the man for myself. In the autumn of 2000, at the height of the apple harvest, I drove to Payson and met Rey on the farm. He had a welcoming, familiar manner that put me right at ease, and our shared passions gave us ready points of connection. I grew up on a farm in Southwestern Michigan and knew the life he was leading. We discovered that the same fruit tree salesman who supplied Southern Utah County was the one I remembered who supplied my family’s orchards back in the 1970s. But our conversation soon had to take a back seat.

There was still fruit hanging in the orchard and Rey is a focused and determined grower. When the moment is right, you pick or else you miss the moment. You keep the apples on the tree long enough to allow the most complete sugar development, but you pick before the cold, snowy season arrives. A whole year’s worth of work all hinges on a brief window for harvesting. It’s a complicated dance step to work out with Mother Nature, but Rey knows this footwork as well as anyone and it was picking time.

I bought a few bins of apples, Braeburn and Fuji, and put them in my car. Freshly harvested, the fruit was crisp and balanced. I must have eaten four or five apples during the drive home. Those are flavors that stay with you, and the pleasure of that find carried me all the way back to Salt Lake City. As far as I was concerned, this was a guy who lived up to the hype.

Rey and his grandson Blake inspect the apple blossoms

The following August, Rey brought me some fruit that he was just beginning to harvest. From the cab floor of his pickup truck he pulled out four or five half-bushel boxes of peaches and nectarines that he thought I might be interested in. Each box contained a different variety with a slightly different color and shape. These were spectacular reddish orbs, fully developed and ripened on the tree. Each one had a story behind it, and he introduced me to the nuances of their different flavors as we tasted our way through the boxes. With every new variety, I was transported out of the parking lot and back in time to the flavors of my youth.

Food memories have a shelf life that is best measured in decades, and I was suddenly back in Sodus, Michigan, in 1973. I was a boy again snacking on the warm flesh of a Glo Haven peach during a muggy summer afternoon. A moment of bliss in a day of drudgery. The peaches ripened so quickly in the August heat that we could barely keep up with the picking before they fell to the ground. We worked the orchards from first light to end of the day for weeks. While every peach I ate was an exquisite pleasure, the orchards as a whole were a source a misery; I couldn’t stand to lose that flavor for another whole year and certainly wasn’t going to miss the endless hours of work.

For 10 years now I’ve had the privilege of tasting the fruits of Rey Allred’s pursuit of perfection, and I can tell you that Rey is as fine a fruit grower as there is. He is one of Utah’s living treasures. This kind of devotion to an art requires a lifetime of commitment. Growing full-flavored fruit, harvesting at that perfect moment when the sugar is peaking, when firmness will allow for a short journey without bruising – these are skills you acquire through a connection to the land, a connection that Rey has clearly cultivated.

Rey Allred’s forebears came to Provo in the 1850s, some of the earliest settlers in the Valley. His father, R. Bliss Allred, and grandfather Charles moved the family to Idaho for a short time to raise sheep, but returned to Provo in 1926 and settled on tree fruit. They bought a 50-acre farm right on University Avenue, where they grew mostly Bartlett pears until the early 1950s when BYU began to acquire the land around them to expand the campus. (The original barn still stands and you can buy Allred Orchards fruit there during the harvest.)

The Allreds had a good relationship with the university and operated the campus orchards for about 15 years. But when Rey graduated from BYU with his degree in horticulture in 1957, he bought the first 80 acres of his own orchard in Payson with some help from his father. He wistfully recalls that he spent 47 years of his life writing checks to pay for his land at the mouth of Payson Canyon (now about 500 acres) and noted that in 2003 he actually outbid a developer for the last piece that he added to it. Something, he quipped, that is not likely to ever happen again. He did it for his family, who along with Rey and his wife have built their homes on the rocky slopes above the orchard which can’t be cultivated. They love this life as much as he does, take their stewardship of their land seriously and consider it to be a privilege.

“You have to be born into it” Rey said. Land on the benches is now in the neighborhood of $60,000 an acre. The same bench land that is so desirable for development is the only suitable place to grow fruit in Northern Utah. Down in the Valley the trees bloom too early and the blossoms are prone to freezing in the unpredictable spring weather. When you calculate the market value of the land and the endless hours of hard work it requires to keep the orchards in production and measure that against and modest living it provides – you begin to fully understand how deep the love and commitment of Utah orchardists is. And what a tremendous service they provide to our community.

Rey’s daughters Becky and Deb have worked the orchard with their dad all their lives and have developed their own expertise. Deb runs the business side and Becky has spent years studying with state entomologist Diane Alston to learn how to manage the bugs and blights that can ruin not only a season’s harvest, but the trees themselves. And Becky’s son Blake, the youngest member of the Allred clan to commit himself to this life, is eager to learn and carry on the family tradition. This spring he spent many long nights setting and tending the giant fans that move warm air through the orchards to protect the blossoms from a moment of frost that can spoil the whole season. There is a lot to know.

Selecting the best varieties for the slope of the Wasatch, and for the altitude and frost drainage of Northeast Payson, is a serious challenge. The obstacles and complexity of growing fine tree fruit in the 21st century should not be underestimated. But Rey has a head for that sort of thing and he’s determined to teach his family all that he can. He understands the land and climate as few others do, not to mention the complicated bureaucracy of immigration and labor policy, the breeding behavior of moths, the climatic conditions that spawn fireblight, the capricious demands of the market and the list goes on.

“Now everyone wants Honeycrisp,” he says. It’s an undeniably good eating apple, but it’s especially susceptible to fireblight, a bacteria that can and does decimate orchards. Not to mention that Honeycrisp is a proprietary variety, which means that in addition to the cost of the tree itself growers must pay $1 per tree up front to the University of Minnesota where the Honeycrisp was developed. It will be at least four years before those trees are producing fruit that can be sold and all the while the size of the investment grows and grows. And the public is fickle. It’s business, to be sure, but there’s a love of the land and this way of life that leads to this level of commitment. And the stewardship born out of living on that same land, raising a family on it, is palpable when you talk with them.

Sadly, Rey and his family are a dying breed. Family fruit farms are now a rarity across the state, and good fruit-growing land has become so scarce that the next generation of producers could be the last for Utah. I could cite statistics, but perhaps it’s easier to just point out that the entire east bench of the Wasatch Mountains was once planted with orchards from Brigham City to Provo – a product of the original settlers’ vision to be a self-sustaining community.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to get a taste of what Rey Allred grows will savor the moment of that first luscious bite of fruit warmed and ripened by the high-altitude sunshine until the first taste of the next season – and each season thereafter. And in the intervening months, the promise of next summer’s pleasure will carry us through winter’s darker, earthier flavors. This this is what it means to eat locally. It’s about preserving the unique history of a region’s flavors and honoring the determination of those few farmers who work so hard to feed our bodies without neglecting our souls.

We owe Rey, his family, and other local growers our gratitude for giving us the chance to stop and savor this taste of home – a pleasure that the fruit grower himself has no time for. There’s a crop to bring in, obligations to meet and orders to fulfill. And then, the season changes and the harvest is over – eventually over for good, if we don’t support their work. It’s time for us all to work toward a future where Rey will not be the last fruit grower in Utah, but one that honors and preserves the knowledge and stewardship he represents.

Steven Rosenberg originally moved to Utah in 1984 to pursue a career in food distribution, but as the food landscape changed he sought greener pastures. In 1993 he opened Liberty Heights Fresh so he could share his knowledge and life-long love of fresh, quality, sustainable food with the rest of us. libertyheightsfresh.com

You can find Allred Orchards fruit during the harvest at Liberty Heights Fresh and the old Allred Barn on University Avenue in Provo. It is also distributed widely through Mountainland Apples, a cooperative of family owned Utah County orchards. The majority of Utah's remaining orchards exist in Davis and Box Elder counties along highway 89 where there are still a handful of fruit stands selling produce during the harvest. For a great day trip this summer go visit them!  Find a complete listing of locally owned and operated Utah orchards on the Utah's Own website.