Esprit de Core

It’s all in the family tree at Beak & Skiff, celebrating 100 years in the orchard

By Tammy DiDomenico

Driving up to Beak & Skiff Apple Farms, it’s hard to escape the melding of the new and the old.

There’s the still-new distillery, opened in 2009, with its expansive views of the orchards. There’s the familiar U-pick orchard, which opened in 1975 on what was home to the farm’s earliest trees. There’s the farm store, which bustles with activity every autumn as families come to the LaFayette orchard to pick their apples. It is housed in an old dairy barn that predates the Beak family’s entry into the apple business.

But it’s the people of Beak & Skiff who reveal far more about the farm’s successful balance of family tradition and innovation. The farm was purchased in 1904 by Charles Andrew Beak, a dairy farmer. In 1911, he and George Skiff, a successful onion and dairy farmer, decided to take a chance on the emerging agricultural business of apple growing. They started with 100 acres, and set to work deciding which variety of apples would thrive in the region’s challenging winters and heavy soil.

They probably had no idea they’d be so successful. Today, George’s greatgreat-grandson Peter Fleckenstein is assistant manager of the orchard, and Andrew’s great-great-grandson Richard Beak works as an orchard technician. All of 24, he doesn’t look like a young man burdened with the weight of five generations of business success and his family’s unsurpassed reputation for quality. Easygoing and soft-spoken, he simply loves the farm and the hard labor involved to keep it going.

“This is my third harvest as a full-time employee,” he says, looking out over the U-pick orchards which, in early August, are lushly green and appealingly quiet. “I started when I was 14, and began working full time when I was 22.”

Beak left LaFayette to attend college, and briefly considered a different path for his life, but the lure of the farm was too strong. “I think it’s the atmosphere,” he says. “I feel like I wanted to carry the legacy. But basically, I just love being able to work outside. It’s hard work but it’s rewarding.”

On a beautiful late summer day, it’s easy to see why. Beak & Skiff’s 300-plus acres are covered in splendid vegetation and cradled in striking vistas. It’s a completely different scene come late November, when Beak and his crew are out in the orchards at all hours, desperately protecting the trees from frost damage. Beak has learned that he cannot fight nature, and rolling with fate is part of a life in agriculture. He embraces the hardships along with the rewards.

“He’s such a great young man,” says Candy Beak Morse, his cousin and a fourth-generation Beak who remains highly involved with day-to-day operations. Morse manages the farm store, which opened in 1976; her husband, Steve Morse, has been instrumental in Beak & Skiff’s forays into winemaking and vodka-making. “Richard works all week out in the orchards, then helps me out whenever I need him here in the store.”

The orchard was a big part of Morse’s life growing up. She remembers her father, Ronnie Beak, working the orchards with his brother, Dick Beak, and Marshall Skiff, grandson of George Skiff. She says that strong work ethic is what has kept the farm successful all these years.

But perhaps no one knows more about Beak & Skiff’s successes and hardships than Stanley Gardner.

Although not blood-related to the Beaks or the Skiffs, he’s been a mainstay at the farm since 1947, and has worked with all five generations of the families. He has done just about everything on the farm. When he started, he trimmed and pruned the trees from 7 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. six days a week.

After 1952, he drove trucks, kept the farm’s fleet of tractors and vehicles running smoothly, and became the in-house expert on refrigeration. He says although he marvels at some of the modern inno vations that Fleckenstein and Richard Beak have available to them, there are some aspects of farming that can never be overcome.

“We used to get a week almost every winter where the temperatures would get below zero, and a complete winter freeze like that is tough,” Gardner says. “You’re always looking at the weather. Hail is the No. 1 worry; it can do so much damage to the crop, or the buds, in a matter of seconds.”

The farm survived two particularly bad years, when entire crops were lost to the weather. In a journal entry from May 1936, Charles Andrew Beak recounted how a deep freeze left not a single apple on his trees. Gardner vividly remembers how a hailstorm in 1950 left “nothing untouched.” Today, officially retired but still a fixture on the farm, Gardner can laugh about the many nights he spent manning smudge pots and wind machines—sometimes until dawn—just trying to keep the air warm enough to ward off damage.

Apple Juiced

At the height of Beak & Skiff’s role in the wholesale apple business—which was booming after World War II—the farm grew to more than 600 acres. Wholesale distribution was the pri-mary focus of the business until 1975, when the U-pick orchard opened, and the families saw the benefits of having retail sales take place on-site. By that time, Robin Skiff’s husband David Pittard, Lynn Fleckenstein, daughter of Marshall Skiff, and her husband Mark Fleckenstein, Tim and Jackie Beak, the children of Dick Beak, and Charlene Beak and Candy Beak, and Candy’s husband Steve Morse were all involved. Each has found the role which best suits the business and are all still involved. “We just kept expanding a little at a time, carefully evaluating things before taking the next step,” says Steve Morse.

One big step was to expand the local market for apple cider in the late 1970s. Gardner and Morse ignored the naysayers—who insisted that pasteurization would ruin the flavor—and devised a method of flash pasteurizing that prevents the solidification of the apple pectin. “Beak & Skiff was the first place that ever flash-pasteurized cider at that level,” says Morse.

While Candy, Jackie and Charlene remain very involved with the retail operations and the farm market, Steve has been busy launching Beak & Skiff’s winemaking and distillery operations and sees those ventures as a key to the farm’s future success. The families now farm about 325 acres—about half of what their fathers and grandfathers did.

But, as Morse explains, one of the biggest changes that has occurred during the farm’s 100-year history is the rise in costs. When George Skiff and Charles Andrew planted those first 149 trees in the LaFayette hills, they cost about 15 cents a tree, and planting was limited to 40 trees per acre. Today, prices average from $20 to $40 per tree, but hundreds grow on each acre.

Further, the market has fueled Beak & Skiff’s recent emphasis on alcoholic beverages. Morse says the farm is working on a wider distribution deal for its hard cider, and the winery is already outgrowing itself. Beak & Skiff produced 1,500 cases of wine in 2001, and Morse expects that number to reach 4,000 this season. The distillery was a time-consuming endeavor to launch, but Morse is already seeing growth.

“We are just starting a wholesale program this fall,” he says. “We can produce 52 cases of vodka per batch, and we process a batch a week.” Next? Gin and apple brandy, of course. “I think we are going to produce one of the finest gins available because of the apple base,” says Morse.

The wholesale apple business has changed a lot in the past 30 years. Morse explains that what used to be a local-based relationship between neighborhood markets and growers is now tightly controlled—and dominated by Asian growers. Peter Fleckenstein has been working with local retailers to keep Beak & Skiff’s apples available to local shoppers, a far more difficult prospect than it would seem.

“There are now fewer and fewer purchasers of wholesale products, and the protocols for dealing with foreign distributors are tough to keep up with,” Morse says. “U.S. distributors are getting just as picky. But, we’re still in the wholesale game with juice.”

Gardner says he has had his opportunities to leave Beak & Skiff. And he did once, briefly. In 1952 Stanley took a friend’s advice and accepted a job with Carrier Corp., in East Syracuse. It lasted nine months. Gardner says he just was not cut out for the confines of factory work—just as he’s not cut out for retirement. His loyalty to the farm is not hard to understand.

“{Beak & Skiff} are always about quality,” he says. “Everything—the buildings, equipment—and of course the apples. That’s remained a constant.” Now an everyouthful 82, Gardner, dubbed “employee of the century” by the families, is happy to see the fifth generation continuing to uphold those virtues in the business to which he has dedicated so much of his life. “It’s been a good place to spend my life,” he says, beaming.

Steve Morse says that no matter how the farm’s business strategies unfold in the decades to come, that commitment to quality is one thing that both families will never compromise. “Quality is the necessary ingredient,” he says. “You don’t have anything without that.”

Just as in 1911, when Charles Nelson Beak snapped the first apples off of his father’s initial plantings, every Beak & Skiff apple is picked by hand. The founders were able to staff the farm with local workers, and that remained true for most of the farm’s history. Today, there are still many locals, but workers from Mexico and elsewhere are also brought in to help with the harvest.

“We never used to have to do that,” Gardner says. “Charlie Beak used to turn people away if they could not get here by 7 a.m. sharp. One year, apples fell off trees, unpicked.” Today, Beak & Skiff‘s seasonal staff includes 50 to 60 pickers, 30 to 35 orchard crew, and more than 50 workers for the farm store Only two varieties of the 16 initially planted on the farm—Northern Spy and Duchess—are still grown on the farm today. Being so close to Cornell University has enabled the farm to learn about new varieties as they are being developed. Still, Richard Beak explains that every apple has its issues. Very few varieties, for example, are resistant to the abundance of insects and fungal pests such as mildew and scab that thrive in this region. Even minor diseases cause blemishes that make the apples less marketable for retail sale. Chain stores seek large, red, apples that may not be attainable consistently. Few varieties meet the ever-demanding standards for wholesale. Growers like Beak & Skiff also seek varieties that have a good shelf life once picked.

The most popular varieties picked at Beak & Skiff are MacIntosh and Empire. They bring in the customers, and Beak says he can’t help but feel proud when he comes up to the U-pick orchard on a Sunday afternoon and it’s full of happy visitors.

His cousin, Candy Morse, couldn’t agree more. While her own daughters have chosen different roads for their lives and now live out of state, she figures that they learned much about hard work and respecting nature from their time on the farm. And while the Beaks and the Skiffs are too busy working to be too nostalgic about how old their success story is, they clearly recognize that it’s a story worth celebrating.

“We’re really proud to have reached this milestone,” she says. “We’ve weathered thick and thin, and expect we will keep doing it for as long as we can.” t

Beak & Skiff celebrates 100 years on Saturday, Nov. 12, at the Winery, 4472 Cherry Valley Turnpike, LaFayette, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sample wines, cheeses and appetizers. Receive a complimentary Beak & Skiff wine glass, while supplies last.

During the fall, all Beak & Skiff properties are open seven days a week. The U- pick orchard, 2705 Lords Hill Road, LaFayette, is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., while the adjacent retail store has hours from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, call 677-5105 or visit beakandskiff.com.