The Packing House Wrote Off 30 Tons of Split Peaches Each July — Her Cider Stand Outsold the Orchard

The Packing House Wrote Off 30 Tons of Split Peaches Each July — Her Cider Stand Outsold the Orchard

On a Tuesday morning in late July of 2019, the loading dock at Harrington Brothers Packing House in Sauk County, Wisconsin, smelled like hot sugar and rot. 43 bins of split peaches sat in the gravel lot, each one a wooden crate stacked 4 ft high. Each one full of fruit that had cracked open in the heat before it ever made it to a truck.

Dale Harrington stood at the edge of the dock with his clipboard and his jaw set, and his eyes moving across those bins the way a man looks at something he’s already decided to stop thinking about. He had made this calculation before. He would make it again. 30 tons, give or take, written off every July.

 Not because the peaches were rotten. Not because they were unsafe. Because they were ugly. And the grocery chains wouldn’t take ugly fruit. And that was the end of it. He initialed the waste log, handed it back to his foreman, and walked inside to take a phone call about next year’s contracts. Let me tell you about what was happening 40 yd away.

 Because that’s where this story actually begins. Across the gravel lot, past the row of refrigerated trucks with their engines running, there was a wooden stand that had been there since the previous summer. It wasn’t much to look at. A 12-ft table under a canvas awning, a hand-painted sign, a small chalkboard menu, and a 19-year-old named Nora Dijkstra sitting on a folding chair with a spiral notebook open across her knees.

She was watching those bins the same way Dale Harrington was watching them. But she was doing math of a different kind. She had been doing that math for two summers now, and the numbers in her notebook had gotten specific enough that she had stopped thinking of them as estimates and started thinking of them as a plan.

Nora’s family had farmed 60 acres of peach and apple orchard in Sauk County for three generations. Her grandfather, Emmett Dijkstra, had planted the first trees in 1961 on ground that most people in the county said was too sandy and too sloped for anything worth growing. He had proven them wrong by the time her father, Raymond, took over in 1989.

Raymond Dijkstra was a careful, methodical man who kept his trees pruned to textbook specification, ran his irrigation on a timer, and delivered his fruit to Harrington brothers every summer with the kind of quiet consistency that earned him a reputation as one of the most reliable growers in the county. He was proud of that reputation.

 He had built it over 30 years, and he was not the kind of man who questioned the system that had rewarded him for it. The system worked like this. Raymond grew the peaches. Harrington brothers graded them. Grade A went to grocery chains in Madison and Milwaukee. Grade B went to roadside markets and smaller retailers.

 And every July, when the heat came early and the fruit cracked on the tree before it could be picked at the right window, somewhere between 20 and 35 tons of perfectly edible peaches got written off as waste because they failed cosmetic inspection. Raymond received a small damage payment from his contract for the split fruit. It covered maybe 40 cents on the dollar.

He accepted it the way he accepted drought and late frost as a cost farming that you couldn’t control. Nora had grown up watching those bins sit in the gravel lot. She had watched them every summer since she was old enough to understand what they represented. And what they represented, as far as she could calculate, was somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000 dollars in fruit that her family grew, that her family harvested, and that disappeared into a dumpster every July without a single dollar of real value being recovered.

She had started keeping notes about it when she was 17. Let me tell you about Nora Dijkstra because you need to understand who she was before you can understand what she did. And she is different from almost every other character this channel has told you about. She was not a grizzled veteran with decades of experience.

She was not a retired engineer with a lifetime of mechanical intuition. She was a 19-year-old girl from a peach farm in central Wisconsin who had spent two years reading every study she could find on value-added agricultural processing, fermentation science, and small-scale cidery economics, and who had come home from her first year at the University of Wisconsin with a notebook full of data and a proposal that her father was not prepared to hear.

She was 5 feet 4 inches tall and wore her hair in a braid and still had her university lanyard clipped to the strap of her backpack when she walked into the family kitchen in June of 2018 and set that notebook on the table next to Raymond’s coffee cup. She had spent the previous semester taking an independent study course with a food systems professor named Dr.

 Annika Sorensen who ran the university’s applied agricultural economics program and who had spent 15 years studying value-added processing and small orchard operations across the upper Midwest. Dr. Sorenson had a filing cabinet full of case studies from Michigan, New York, Vermont, and Ontario showing what happened when orchards stopped treating their cosmetically imperfect fruit as waste and started treating it as a raw material.

The numbers were not subtle. They were not marginal. They were, in some cases, transformative. Nora had read every one of those case studies. She had built a spreadsheet. She had run the numbers three different ways to make sure she wasn’t making an error. And then she had come home. Let me tell you about the science because it matters and because Nora understood it better than anyone in Sauk County at the time.

Which is precisely why nobody listened to her. A split peach is not a damaged peach in any meaningful agricultural sense. The skin has cracked, usually from a rapid change in moisture. A heavy rain after a dry spell or in Sauk County’s case, the particular combination of sandy soil and July heat that caused the fruit to expand faster than the skin could accommodate.

The flesh inside is intact. The sugar content is actually slightly elevated in split fruit because the water loss concentrates the Brix. The flavor is, in many cases, superior to cosmetically perfect fruit picked slightly early to survive shipping. What a split peach cannot do is sit on a grocery shelf for eight days without deteriorating.

What it can do, if processed within 48 hours of harvest is produce a fermented cider or pressed juice or value-added preserve with flavor characteristics that cosmetically perfect early picked grocery fruit cannot match. Dr. Sorenson’s research showed that an orchard operation processing its own split and call fruit into hard cider recovered on average between three and six times the per pound value of that fruit compared to the damage payment received from a packing house contract.

The range depended on scale, equipment, and market access. At the low end of that range applied to the Dykstra orchards average annual waste volume Nora calculated a recovery of somewhere between 47,000 and 62,000 dollars per year from fruit that was currently generating 11,000 dollars in damage payments. At the high end, the number approached 110,000 dollars.

She had not used the high end in her proposal. She had used the low end because she wanted her father to trust the math. Raymond Dykstra set down his coffee cup. He looked at the notebook. He looked at his daughter. He said carefully that he appreciated the work she had put into this. He said that the family had a good relationship with Harrington Brothers that had taken 30 years to build.

He said that adding a processing operation to a 60-acre orchard was not a small undertaking and that he needed to think about it. Nora said she understood. She left the notebook on the table. Her mother, Carolyn, who who said nothing during the conversation found Nora in the barn an hour later and said quietly that she thought Nora was right and that she had always thought the waste was a problem worth solving.

She said Raymond would come around if the numbers held up. She said, “Give him time.” Raymond took 6 weeks. At the end of those 6 weeks, he came to Nora and said she could use the old equipment shed at the back of the property and he would give her 10 acres of the orchard’s split fruit yield to work with. He said he was not endorsing the idea.

He said he was giving her room to test it. He said, “If she lost money, they would not do it again.” Nora said that was fair. She shook his hand. She went back to her notebook and started making a different kind of list. Let me tell you about the summer of 2018 because it was the summer Nora Dickstra built something out of nothing and the county did not notice and that was fine with her.

She spent 3 weeks in June converting the equipment shed into a licensed processing space. She sourced a used 60-gallon press from an operation in Door County that had closed the previous year. She bought a pair of stainless fermentation tanks second-hand from a home brewing supply company in Madison. She got her Wisconsin cottage food processor license and her small winery permit which required three visits to the county office and a 4-hour food safety certification course that she completed online in two sittings.

She built the cider stand from lumber her father had in the barn. She painted the sign herself. She priced her product at $8 for a 16 oz bottle of fresh pressed peach juice and $14 for a 12 oz bottle of hard peach cider, which she had calculated as the price point that balanced accessibility with margin. Her first batch used 400 lb of split fruit from the first major heat event of the summer.

She pressed it on a Thursday night, bottled the juice Friday morning, and opened the stand at the end of the orchard road on Saturday. She sold out in 3 hours. She did not tell Dale Harrington. She did not tell anyone at the packing house. She just opened the stand, sold the product, and wrote the numbers in her notebook.

 By the end of August 2018, Nora had processed 11 separate batches from the season’s split fruit yield, totaling approximately 4,200 lb of fruit. Her revenue from the stand was $14,300. Her expenses, including equipment amortization, licensing fees, supplies, and the market value of the raw fruit at damage payment rates, came to $6,800.

Her net was $7,500 from fruit that would have generated, at the standard damage payment rate, approximately $840. She showed Raymond the numbers at the kitchen table in September. He looked at them for a long time. He said, “That’s not bad.” Nora said it was the first year with used equipment and no marketing and a stand she built from scrap lumber.

Raymond nodded. He said he needed to think about next year. The kitchen was quiet. Carolyn refilled his coffee without being asked. Now, let me tell you about Dale Harrington because he is not a villain in this story, but he is the reason this story needed to happen, and you need to understand the shape of his certainty before you can understand what it cost him.

Dale Harrington was 54 years old in 2018 and had run Harrington Brothers Packing House for 22 years after his father, Gerald Harrington, handed it to him in 1996. The business had been in the family since 1971. Dale had grown it from a regional operation handling eight growers to a mid-scale packing and distribution business with contracts covering 31 orchards across three counties, and distribution relationships with seven grocery chains in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois.

He drove a late-model pickup truck and wore a Harrington Brothers polo shirt every day and kept a framed copy of his Wisconsin Agribusiness Association award on the wall behind his desk. He was not a bad man. He was a man who had built something real and who had very specific ideas about how the fruit business worked.

And those ideas had been correct for long enough that he had stopped checking whether they were still correct. Dale held court most mornings at the counter of the Sauk County Co-op on Route 12, where he and a rotating cast of growers and equipment dealers drank coffee and talked about prices and weather and contracts.

He was the kind of man who knew everyone and whom everyone knew, and that social position had given his opinions a gravitational pull that was hard to separate from their actual merit. Nora Dykstra was not a regular at the co-op counter. She was 19 years old and a woman and a college student. And in Sauk County in 2018, none of those things made you a voice that got heard at the co-op counter without effort.

She knew this. She had grown up in this county. She was not naive about the landscape she was operating in. She went to the co-op counter anyway in October of 2018 because she needed Dale Harrington to understand what she was proposing before the next season began. And because she believed the numbers were strong enough to speak for themselves.

She was wrong about the numbers being enough, but she was right to go. She waited until the morning crowd had thinned to four people. Dale, his equipment dealer Wes Crowley, a grower named Bud Seavert, and the co-op’s counter manager. And she set her notebook on the counter and walked Dale through the summer’s results in the plain language.

She told him what she had processed, what she had sold, what the margins looked like, and what she believed the opportunity was if the packing house were willing to redirect some of its waste stream fruit to small-scale processing operations rather than the dumpster. Dale Harrington listened. He let her finish.

 He picked up his coffee cup, and then he did something that Nora would remember for the rest of her life. He smiled at her the way a man smiles when he is not disagreeing with you, but is also not going to change anything he is doing. It was a patient smile, the kind that has been practiced until it feels like courtesy. He said that he appreciated her entrepreneurial spirit.

He said that the waste stream issue was more complicated than it looked from the outside. He said that the liability exposure from processing split fruit was not something a small operation could manage without significant infrastructure. He said that the grocery chains set the cosmetic standards, not him, and that there was nothing to be done about it.

Wes Crowley laughed. Not a mean laugh, exactly. More the laugh of a man who has heard a young person say something impractical and is trying to be kind about it. He said something about peach wine being a nice hobby. Bud Seavert didn’t say anything, but he looked at his coffee. Nora looked at Dale Harrington for a moment.

 She said, “The liability exposure from a licensed small winery permit in Wisconsin is fully covered under the existing cottage processor framework.” She said she knew because she had the permit. She closed her notebook. She said she hoped he would think about it. She drove home. Let me tell you what that laugh meant because it matters and because Nora understood it better than Wes Crowley did.

The laugh was not about peach wine. The laugh was about the distance between a 19-year-old girl with a notebook and the 31 orchard distribution network that Dale Harrington had spent 22 years building. The laugh was about the assumption that the people who had always made the decisions would always make the decisions.

 And that the appropriate response to an unconventional idea from an unconventional source was patience, not engagement. The laugh was about the comfort of a system that had worked long enough to feel like weather. The laugh was also, as it turned out, about 30 tons of peaches a year that Dale Harrington had been writing off since 1997.

Raymond Dijkstra gave Nora 30 acres for the 2019 season, not the whole orchard, not an endorsement, 30 acres of the most split-prone ground, the sandy lower slope where the heat hit hardest and the fruit cracked earliest, the ground that generated the highest percentage of cosmetic rejects every year. He said if she could make the numbers work on that ground, they would talk about expanding.

 He said he was watching. Nora said she understood. She went back to the equipment shed and started planning for a volume four times what she had handled in 2018. She spent the winter upgrading the processing space. She sourced a 200-gallon press from a cidery in Michigan that was scaling up to larger equipment. She added two additional fermentation tanks.

 She built a cold storage room in the back of the shed using insulated panels and a second-hand refrigeration unit. She applied for and received a Wisconsin farm winery license, which expanded her permitted production volume and allowed her to sell at farmers markets and through licensed retailers, not just at the farm stand. She hired two part-time workers for the summer, both of them neighbors’ kids who needed seasonal work.

She redesigned the stand, added a tasting area with four stools, and printed proper labels for her bottles, white with a hand-drawn peach and the name she had chosen for the operation, Dykstra Orchard Cider. She opened in late June of 2019 and did not close until the first week of October. Let me tell you about the summer of 2019 because it was a summer the numbers stopped being a proposal and started being a verdict.

 The first major split event came on July 9th when 3 days of rain followed 2 weeks of dry heat and the fruit on the lower slope cracked across 12 rows in a single afternoon. Raymond’s foreman called it in as a loss. Nora was in the orchard within an hour with her two workers and every bin she had and they harvested through the evening and into the night.

By the next morning, 4,800 lb of split peaches were in the processing shed and Nora was running the press by 6:00 a.m. She pressed for 2 days straight. She filled every fermentation tank she had. She bottled 312 units of fresh juice and set 60 gallons of cider must to ferment. She was back at the stand by Friday.

 She sold out of fresh juice by noon on Saturday and had to put a pre-order list on the chalkboard for the following week’s cider release. Dale Harrington’s foreman wrote off 31 tons from the Harrington Brothers Growers that same week. The bins sat in the gravel lot for 4 days before the waste hauler came. Nora drove past them on her way to the farmers market in Baraboo on Saturday morning.

 She noted the volume in her notebook. By the end of July, she had processed 11,000 lb of split fruit from the 30-acre block and generated $42,000 in gross revenue. Her margins on the hard cider were running at 63%. Her margins on fresh juice were running at 58%. The farmers market booth in Baraboo had a waiting list for her cider releases.

A wine shop in Madison had reached out about carrying her product after one of their customers brought in a bottle and the owner tasted it and called the number on the label. Raymond Dykstra drove past the stand on a Thursday afternoon in late July and sat in his truck for a few minutes watching the line. There were 11 people waiting on a Thursday.

 He drove back to the house and did not say anything to Nora that evening. But at dinner, he asked Carolyn to pass the salt in a tone of voice that meant he was thinking hard about something. Wes Crowley saw the stand on his way to a service call in early August and mentioned it to Dale Harrington the next morning at the co-op. He said it looked like Raymond’s daughter was doing pretty well with her little setup.

Dale said that was nice and asked about equipment prices. Let me tell you about the season’s end because the numbers from September of 2019 are the reason this story has been told in Sauk County ever since. Nora closed the stand on October 4th, 2019. She spent the following week doing her accounting. The final numbers for the season were these.

 She had processed 44,200 pounds of split and cull fruit from the 30-acre block, which represented approximately 87% of the cosmetic reject volume from that ground. Her total gross revenue was $111,400. Her total expenses, including equipment, labor, supplies, licensing, market fees, and the allocated cost of raw fruit at damage payment rates were $41,200.

Her net operating income was $70,200. The damage payment Raymond would have received from Harrington Brothers for the same volume of fruit at the standard contract rate would have been approximately $9,300. Nora sat at the kitchen table and showed Raymond the final accounting on a Tuesday evening in October.

She set the spreadsheet in front of him and let him read it without saying anything. Raymond read it twice. He looked up. He said, “$70,000.” Nora said, “Yes.” He said, “From the 30-acre block.” She said, “Yes.” He was quiet for a moment. He said, “What would the whole orchard look like?” Nora opened to the next page of her notebook where she had already run that calculation.

She slid it across the table. Raymond looked at the number on that page for a long time. Then he said quietly, “You were right.” He said it the way a man says something he has known for a while but needed the proof to be complete before he could say it out loud. Nora said she knew. She said it without any edge in it. She meant it simply.

Raymond nodded. He said, “You decide the rotation next year. Now, let me tell you about what happened in the spring of 2020 because the story doesn’t end with a spreadsheet on a kitchen table. The wine shop in Madison had placed an order in November for 48 cases of Dijkstra Orchard Cider, which was the largest single wholesale order Nora had received and which required her to expand her cold storage capacity before the spring release.

 She had also received inquiries from two additional retailers, a specialty grocery in Milwaukee and a farm-to-table restaurant in Spring Green that wanted to feature her cider on their beverage menu. She had applied for and received a Wisconsin direct ship license, which allowed her to sell product online and ship within the state.

She had hired a third seasonal worker and was in conversation with her father about converting the full 60-acre orchards cosmetic reject stream to the processing operation. She had also, in February of 2020, been invited to present her operations results at the Wisconsin Orchard Growers Association annual meeting in Wisconsin Dells.

She was the youngest presenter on the program by approximately 20 years. She was the only woman presenting on production economics. Let me tell you about that presentation because it is where the story became larger than one farm. She stood at a podium in a conference room at the Kalahari Resort with a laptop and a projected spreadsheet and 63 orchard operators in the audience.

And she walked them through two years of data from the Dijkstra operation in plain language. She showed them the waste volumes. She showed them the damage payment rates. She showed them the processing costs and the per unit margins and the revenue recovery ratios. She showed them the comparison between what their contracts were paying them for cosmetic rejects and what a licensed processing operation could recover from the same fruit.

She did not editorialize. She did not make arguments. She showed them the numbers and let the numbers speak. The room was quiet in a specific way during that presentation. Not the quiet of disinterest. The quiet of people doing math in their heads and not liking where the math was coming out. Dale Harrington was in the third row.

 He had not known Nora was presenting until he saw her name on the program that morning. He had sat down anyway. He listened to the whole thing. When she showed the slide comparing the $9,000 damage payment to the $70,000 net operating income from the same fruit volume. He looked at his hands. After the presentation, there was a reception in the hallway.

Nora was standing near the coffee station with her father, who had driven down for the day and who was standing slightly behind her left shoulder with his arms at his sides and a look on his face that was not quite pride and not quite wonder, but was somewhere between the two. Three orchard operators came to talk to her within the first 10 minutes.

They had questions about licensing and equipment and market access and processing timelines. She answered all of them from memory. Dale Harrington came to find her 20 minutes into the reception. He waited until the other operators had moved on. He was holding a cup of coffee he hadn’t drunk. He said, “Nora.” She said, “Mr.

Harrington.” He said he had some questions about the processing model. She looked at him for a moment. She said she was happy to answer questions. She said, “I believe your exact words were that the liability exposure was more complicated than it looked from the outside.” Dale Harrington looked at his coffee.

He said that was fair. He said he had been wrong about that. He said the numbers were hard to argue with. Nora said the numbers had always been hard to argue with. She said she had shown them to him in October of 2018. He said he knew. He said he was sorry it had taken him this long. Nora looked at him for a moment.

 She said, “The lesson isn’t that cider is better than a packing house contract. She said, ‘The lesson is that any operation that treats its own product as waste without asking whether it could be something else is leaving money on the ground every year. And the ground doesn’t care how long you’ve been farming it.

‘ She said, ‘I’ll send you the processing framework.'” She said it the way someone says something that is the end of a conversation and the beginning of something else. Raymond Dijkstra, standing 2 ft behind his daughter, said nothing. But, he was looking at Dale Harrington with the quiet, level expression of a man who had been patient for a very long time.

Let me tell you about the years that followed because the story doesn’t end in a conference room hallway, and this is the part that matters most. By the spring of 2021, Nora had converted the full 60-acre orchards cosmetic reject stream to the Dijkstra orchard cider processing operation. The equipment shed had been expanded twice.

The cold storage room now held 480 cases. She had hired four full-time seasonal workers and one part-time year-round employee who handled wholesale orders and logistics during the off-season. The farm winery license had been upgraded to a full commercial winery license, which removed the production volume cap and opened distribution out of state retailers through a Wisconsin-licensed distributor.

Her product was in 11 retail locations across Wisconsin by the end of 2021. The Spring Green Restaurant had featured Dijkstra orchard cider on their menu for two consecutive seasons and had mentioned it in a review in a Madison food publication, which generated a spike in online orders that Nora had not fully anticipated and which required her to add a second cold storage unit in January of 2022.

The per acre revenue from the 60-acre orchard, calculated across all income streams, fresh fruit sales, processing revenue, wholesale, direct-to-consumer, had increased by 231% between 2017 and 2022. Raymond had not changed his farming practices. He had not changed his irrigation schedule or his pruning regimen or his relationship with the soil.

He had simply stopped treating a portion of his harvest as a liability and started treating it as a raw material. The ground had been producing that material all along. Nobody had been looking at it the right way. Dale Harrington restructured Harrington Brothers waste stream policy in 2021. He partnered with three small processing operations in the county to redirect cosmetic reject fruit that had previously gone to the waste hauler.

He did not publicize this change widely. He made it quietly, the way a man makes a correction he should have made earlier. One of the three processing he partnered with was Dijkstra Orchard Cider, which now received a formal supply agreement for split fruit from two of the Harrington Brothers growers who did not have their own processing capacity.

Wes Crowley stopped by the Dijkstra stand in the summer of 2021 and bought two bottles of cider. He did not mention the conversation at the co-op counter. Neither did Nora. Bud Seavert, who had said nothing at the co-op counter in October of 2018, came to the farm in the spring of 2022 and asked Nora if she would be willing to consult on setting up a processing operation for his apple orchard in the next county over.

He said he had been thinking about it for a while. He said he had some split fruit volume that was going to waste every year and he wanted to know if the numbers could work for him. Nora said she would be glad to help. She charged him a consulting fee that was fair and spent two days walking his operation and writing a framework document that he could take to his county extension office.

She did not mention the co-op counter. She did not need to. Let me tell you about the summer of 2023 because there is one more thing you need to know. Nora was 23 years old in the summer of 2023 and she had been running the processing operation for 5 years and she had learned things about fermentation and market development and small-scale food business that she had not learned from Dr.

 Sorenson’s case studies because some things you can only learn by doing them. She had also in that time developed a specific understanding of the orchard’s ecology that her father had not anticipated when he handed her the 30-acre block in 2019. She had noticed across five seasons of close observation that the split fruit events were not random.

They followed a pattern tied to soil moisture retention on the lower slope and that pattern could be partially managed through a combination of regulated deficit irrigation and a specific cover crop mix that increased the soil’s water holding capacity in a way that buffered the fruit against rapid moisture fluctuation.

 She had read the research on this in her third year of running the operation in a paper published by the USDA Agricultural Research Service on peach split fruit incidents and soil moisture management. She had tested it on a 2-acre trial plot in 2022. The results were not dramatic. They were not supposed to be. The goal was not to eliminate split fruit.

She needed split fruit for her processing operation and eliminating it entirely would have been counterproductive. The goal was to shift the timing and distribution of split events so that the fruit cracked in a more manageable sequence rather than all at once during a single heat event, which would allow her to process it at higher quality without the overnight emergency harvest that had defined her first few seasons.

The trial worked. Not perfectly, but well enough that she expanded it to 8 acres in 2023 and planned to roll it out across the full lower slope in 2024. She told Raymond about it at dinner in August of 2023. She showed him the trial data. Raymond looked at the numbers. He said, “So, you’re managing the split to fit your processing schedule.

” Nora said, “Essentially, yes.” Raymond was quiet for a moment. He said, “That’s not something I ever thought to do.” Nora said she knew. She said the research had been there for a while. He nodded. He said, “What else are you reading?” She told him about a paper on integrated pest management and reduced input orchard systems that she had been working through.

She told him about a conference on regenerative orchard practices she was planning to attend in Vermont in October. Raymond listened. He asked questions. Carolyn refilled his coffee. After dinner, Raymond sat on the porch for a while in the way he sat when he was thinking about something he wasn’t ready to say yet.

 Nora came out and sat in the other chair, and they looked at the orchard in the evening light. The rows of trees on the slope, the equipment shed with its new addition, the stand at the end of the road with its sign. Raymond said, “Your grandfather would have liked what you’ve done with this place.” He said it the way he He things that cost him something to say.

Nora said she thought about that sometimes. Raymond said, “So do I. Let me tell you about one last thing because this is where the story finds its shape.” In the spring of 2024, Nora’s younger sister, a 17-year-old named Petra, who had been quietly watching the operation for 3 years, came to the kitchen table with her own notebook.

She had been reading about hemp cultivation as a companion crop in orchard systems and about the regulatory changes in Wisconsin that had made industrial hemp production legally viable for the first time. She had a proposal. She wanted to trial hemp on the non-orchard ground at the south end of the property.

Eight acres of flat, well-drained soil that Raymond had been renting to a neighbor for row crops at a rate that Petra had calculated was significantly below what the ground could generate in a diversified system. She had a spreadsheet. She had sourced the seed. She had already called the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture about the licensing requirements.

She set the notebook on the table next to Nora’s coffee cup. She said she wanted to know what Nora thought. Nora looked at the notebook. She looked at her sister. She thought about a kitchen table in June of 2018 and a spiral notebook and a father who had said he needed to think about it. She thought about a co-op counter and a patient smile and a laugh that had meant something specific about who was allowed to have ideas in Sauk County, Wisconsin.

She thought about 30 tons of split peaches sitting in a gravel lot in the July heat and a clipboard and a waste log and a man who had made the same calculation so many times it had stopped feeling like a decision. She said, yes. She said it the way someone says something they have been waiting to say for a long time without knowing it.

She said, show me the numbers and let’s figure out what you need. Petra opened the notebook. Raymond, who was pouring his own coffee by the counter, turned around and looked at his two daughters at the table with their notebooks and their numbers and their ideas about what the ground could do. He stood there for a moment.

 He did not say anything. He did not need to. Nora Dickstra still farms 60 acres of peach and apple orchard in Sauk County, Wisconsin. The equipment shed is now a licensed cidery with a tasting room that is open Thursday through Sunday from May through October. The stand at the end of the orchard road has been there since 2018.

 The chalkboard menu has more items on it than it used to. The notebook that started all of it sits in a drawer in the cidery office next to a framed copy of the first wholesale order from the Madison wine shop and a photograph of the 30-acre lower slope taken in July of 2019, the morning after the first big split event of that season, with Nora and her two workers standing in front of the first full row of bins they had harvested through the night.

Dale Harrington still runs Harrington Brothers. He still writes off some fruit every July, less than he used to. 30 tons of split peaches sat in a gravel lot in Sauk County every July for 22 years. A 19-year-old with a notebook looked at them and saw something different. The packing house wrote them off. The cider stand sold out by noon on Saturday.

The ground had been telling the same story the whole time. It just needed someone young enough not to know it was impossible.