The Fruit Growers News

The hub of Oakwood Fruit Farm sits at the top of Apple Ridge Road amidst some of Wisconsin’s most beautiful, rolling scenery. Lest customers lose their way on often-winding roads that wrap around the ridges, hills and hollows, Oakwood Fruit Farm maintains an extensive system of bright, attractive directional signs.

Located 10 miles east of Richland Center in southwestern Wisconsin’s Richland County, Oakwood Fruit Farm, is just part of the farming operation owned by the Louis family. While Wisconsin is best known for its dairy farms and Wisconsin cheese, the Louis family is unusual in that it operates both dairy and orchard enterprises.

Oakwood Fruit Farm and Applouis Registered Holsteins are owned by John Louis and his wife, Vonnie, and their children, Greg Alvin and his wife, Judy (Louis) Alvin; and Steve Louis and his wife, Jody.

Although they are fully involved in both the orchard and dairy operations, both Steve and Greg admit they rarely milk cows anymore. Randy Buske, who was hired as herdsman a year ago, does that. Greg, who has been involved in the farm for 24 years, is responsible for crop management and managing the crews that maintain the orchard and pick the apples, plus he is responsible for general veterinary work. Steve, who serves as a director of the Wisconsin Apple Growers Association, is in charge of marketing of both the dairy and fruit operations.

Spending winters in Arizona, John has turned the dairy business over to Greg and Steve. He is involved in the day-to-day operation of the orchard when in Wisconsin.

Albert Louis began what is now Oakwood Fruit Farm. The orchard, which is located about half a mile from the dairy operation, will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2004. It was founded as a fruit-tree nursery, which helped start the orchard.

Oakwood’s elevation and rolling hills protect it from harsh winds and killing frosts, particularly important in a spring like this year’s since lower ground in the area experienced three killing frosts.

“We’re located where we are for a reason,” Greg said. “If we were in the valley, we wouldn’t be picking apples this year.”

Today’s Oakwood Fruit Farm has 150 acres of apples, two acres of grapes and two acres of cherries.

McIntosh and Cortland apples make up over 80% of the orchard. Like many orchardists, the Louis family is taking out many of its Red Delicious trees. In all, they have about 20 varieties, including Gala, Jonagold and Honeycrisp.

Oakwood Fruit Farm was the first orchard in the state to plant dwarfing rootstocks.

“We have a nice rotation from the old into the new,” Greg notes. “Ten years ago, three-quarters of the orchard was in the large old trees - the semi-dwarfs that were 10 to 18 feet tall.”

Most of the existing trees are grown on M26 and Bud9 rootstock, and all new plantings this spring were on Bud9. In the past, most were on M7 rootstock. They plan to start planting on G30 and G16 rootstock.

“We used to put in a lot of M9s, a little tree, but they didn’t do well on our heavy soils, so we don’t do that anymore,” Greg notes.

About 80% of the apple crop goes to wholesale markets. The Roundy’s (formerly Copp’s Food Stores) chain is the primary buyer, but they also sell to Kohl’s Food Stores and several others. For wholesale accounts, about 30% of the premium apples are tray packed, while the remaining apples are bagged.

Between 65,000 and 80,000 bushels of apples go through Oakwood Fruit Farm’s four-lane weight-sizer packing line each year. The total includes about 60,000 bushels from Oakwood and apples from two or three smaller growers.

The orchard employs about 15 apple pickers during harvest and that many more in the packing shed. The orchard has five or six year-round employees.

Oakwood Fruit Farm has a healthy cider market. It sells its apples to Sunrise Orchard in nearby Gays Mills, then buys back pasteurized cider. Oakwood sells 25,000 gallons of cider a year to on-farm retail customers and three food stores.

Although their on-farm market utilizes only about 10% of their apple crop, it is important part of their marketing mix. Judy Alvin and Vonnie manage and operate the retail store, and Judy does bookkeeping. The weekend retail workforce expands to 10 older high-school workers and family members, including Jody, who is a second-grade teacher; Greg and Judy’s 15-year-old son, Nathan, who also works in the orchard during summer months; and Joan Maxey, John’s youngest sister.

“We have samples of all the apples,” Steve says. “We want people to try as many varieties as they want, and we want people around who can answer their questions.”

Having someone who can answer questions is a practice the current generation of Louises learned from Grampa Bill, who passed away in 1990.

“Grampa Bill loved to sit in his lawn chair and talk to people. A lot of people came to talk to him,” says Steve. “That’s where we got our way of talking to customers. We want to be able to talk to them and educate them.”

Talking to visitors and teaching them about apple use and different varieties means customers leave with apples that best meet their needs and tastes.

“We want happy customers because happy customers make for return customers,” Greg stresses.

The retail operation, which remains open until Christmas, encompasses 2,000 square feet of retail space. In addition to their own fruit and cider, Oakwood Fruit Farm sells jams, jellies, salsa, soup mixes, Amish-made candy, pumpkins, gourds, squash, Indian corn, maple syrup, horseradish, honey, sorghum and some crafts. Like the cheese and cheese spreads sold from refrigerated cases, most of the products are produced in Wisconsin.

A special attraction on Tuesday and Saturday mornings is squeaky-fresh cheese curds from the Carr Valley cheese plant. Cheese lovers know cheese curds are best when they are so fresh they squeak when eaten, and early Saturday-morning visitors to the orchard will quickly snap up a total of 50 pounds of cheese curds.

“They last only a couple of hours before they’re all sold,” Steve notes.

Caramel apples also are popular. Although available every day, Oakwood Fruit Farm sells between 1,000 and 1,400 caramel apples every weekend in the fall.

Four years ago, Oakwood Fruit Farm started a small u-pick enterprise that includes grapes - Concord, Niagara and some Fredonia varieties - Montmorency tart cherries and apples. Virtually all the grapes are picked by Amish families, while the cherries and apples have a broader customer base.

Both Greg and Steve employ a sense of humor when it comes to their tart cherry u-pick enterprise.

“It’s a close contest between the birds, (rac)coons and people to see who gets the most, and I don’t think the people have ever won,” Greg says.

Despite the harvesting by non-paying cherry lovers, both Steve and Greg believe u-pick will play a growing role in their operation in years to come.

“We have a lot of second- and third-generation customers, and they’re not used to us having pick-your-own yet,” Greg says. “It’s there and we have started it, and we think it will grow. We think we’ll get new customers because of it, but a lot of our local customers are farmers and they’re not looking to go out and pick apples.”

The u-pick operation appeals to customers who have made Oakwood Fruit Farm a destination. The orchard is located 50 miles west of Madison and 72 miles south of LaCrosse, Wis. Based on the cars in their parking lot, they see a number from Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota.

“There’s an amazing number of people who come from Illinois,” Greg notes.

The Louis family fully understands the value of word-of-mouth advertising, and it is the reason Oakwood Fruit Farm is one of the rest stops on an annual bike tour that starts at the nearby University of Wisconsin – Richland County campus. Between 300 and 400 bicyclists take a rest at Oakwood during the first weekend in October and many return later.

Oakwood Fruit Farm also is a popular place for school tours. The Louis family typically hosts two school tours a day, except on Tuesdays, from Sept. 1 through November. Over 1,000 students, mostly from kindergarten to second-grade, visit the farm each fall.

“Sometimes you think the school tours are a waste of time. . . but you’ll see a lot of those kids coming back on the weekends with mom and dad,” Greg says.

Conservation farming has long been a major priority of the Louis family.

“My grandfather was a stickler for conservation,” Steve says of Bill Louis.

The entire tillable portion of the farm - which includes 1,000 acres of owned and rented, tillable and wooded land - is planted in contour strips, plus they have installed grass waterways, dams and diversions where needed. An oats nurse crop for their alfalfa crop and no-till corn practices help keep hillside soil in place.

“We’ve got good soil, but we have a lot of spots with clay, so there are some drainage issues,” adds Greg.

Since all trees in the orchard are planted on rolling ground, the Louises use a grass seeder to establish a cover crop as soon as old trees are replaced. They seed dwarf grasses to cut down on the time spent mowing the orchard.

They rely on IPM practices in the orchard. To aid that effort, they have hired entomologist John Aue. Because Aue also works with other orchardists in the region, he often is able to give them a “heads up” on pests and diseases he is seeing in other locations.

The Louis family also works almost yearly with University of Wisconsin - Madison researchers who conduct a number of field studies in their orchard.

An attention to conservation has served the family well over the generations. The Louises were named Richland County’s Conservation Farmers of the Year in 1996 and, the following year, received southwestern Wisconsin’s conservation award.

That isn’t the only honor the family has earned. In 2000, they were featured in Holstein World, the Holstein industry’s magazine, and Greg, Steve and John were photographed for the magazine’s cover. In 2000, both Greg and Judy and Steve and Jody were named their county’s Outstanding Young Farmers. In their early 40s, Greg and Judy were over the age limit to compete in the Jaycee-sponsored state contest, but Steve and Jody advanced to the state competition and came home as Wisconsin’s Outstanding Young Farmers. They were finalists in the national contest earlier this year.

Applouis is anything but an average dairy farm. Started in the late 1940s by the late Bill Louis and his son, John, Applouis has a registered Holstein herd of 135 cows which have a rolling herd average of 27,000 pounds, above the state average of 17,000 pounds of milk per cow per year.

While milk production is important to the Louis family, Applouis Registered Holsteins is best known in the dairy industry for its marketing of genetics.

Greg and Steve own high-genetic cows and heifers as a separately held enterprise and sell high-index heifers and embryos to dairy producers around the world.

They currently are building a new heifer facility and recently built a bull facility. Both are designed to better showcase dairy animals to prospective buyers, plus the heifer barn has veterinary facilities in which embryos can be flushed from superior bred heifers and cows.

Despite the state and national publicity they’ve received, the entire Louis family is focused on continuing to build their orchard and dairy enterprises into the very best and most progressive they can be.

“We’ve always had the mentality that if you’re going to do something, do it well,” Steve maintains.