New York State

How apples came

European settlers brought apple seeds to New York in the 1600s¹. The first named varieties came mostly from Holland, later ones from Germany, France and the British Isles³, and the Dutch probably planted the first apples in the Hudson Valley, the English on Long Island². When General Sullivan’s expedition of 1779 destroyed the towns of the Cayuga and Seneca, its reports told of apple and peach orchards “bending with fruit”; in 1904 two old trees near the Geneva experiment station were all that remained of hundreds around the town of Kanadesaga³.

Early farm orchards were mostly seedlings, grown for cider, vinegar, drying and feeding stock, with a few trees grafted to better kinds. Grafted trees spread from nurseries such as the one Robert Prince set up at Flushing, Long Island, about 1730³. Close by, at Newtown, a seedling of the early eighteenth century gave the Newtown Pippin, whose original tree is said to have stood on Gershom Moore’s estate until about 1805⁴. It was the first American apple to be noticed in Europe: fruit of the 1758 crop sent to Benjamin Franklin in London is the earliest transatlantic shipment on record, and in 1778 Thomas Jefferson planted grafted trees of it at Monticello^3,4.

Commercial growing began near New York City and moved up the Hudson. Robert Pell of Esopus, in Ulster County, was exporting Newtown Pippins from about 8 ha of bearing trees as early as 1825–1830³. As canals and railways opened markets inland, commercial orchards multiplied in the 1850s, above all in western New York³, and in 1875 the state census found 18,278,636 apple trees². Insects and scab then drove some growers to fell their orchards in the 1880s, until arsenical insecticides, pioneered largely in western New York, and fungicides put growing on a firmer footing³.

How they’re grown

Most commercial fruit comes from three regions: western New York along the south shore of Lake Ontario, with 71% of the fruit acreage, the Hudson Valley with 22% and the Champlain valley with 7%². Cornell’s extension teams count Niagara, Orleans, Monroe, Wayne and Oswego counties as the western region, Clinton and Essex as the Champlain valley, and Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Putnam, Orange and Ulster as the Hudson Valley¹². The 2022 Census of Agriculture found about 25,300 ha of apples on 1,686 farms. Wayne County alone, on the lake, had about 11,230 ha, 44% of the total; Ulster had about 3,230 ha and Orleans 2,810¹¹.

Orchards near Lake Ontario or the Finger Lakes stay cooler in spring and bloom later, when frost is less likely. The frost of 18 May 2023 still killed blossom in some orchards across the state, taking up to 95% of the crop on some farms and perhaps a fifth statewide, and warmer winters are bringing bloom earlier¹³. Trees flower from mid-May in some districts and a month later in others¹⁵.

Planting has intensified. The oldest orchards, 75 years old or more, stand on seedling roots at 86 to 124 trees a hectare and grow fruit for sauce and juice; progressive growers now plant nearly 2,500 trees a hectare, some as many as 6,200². M. G. Hurd of Clintondale, in Ulster County, built the first successful commercial controlled-atmosphere store in the United States in 1941, to keep McIntosh longer².

The legislature founded the state’s agricultural experiment station at Geneva on 26 June 1880, “for the purpose of promoting agriculture in its various branches by scientific investigation and experiment”; it took up fruit varieties in 1887, joined Cornell University in 1923, and is now Cornell AgriTech⁵. Its apple breeding began in the late 1890s and had released 65 varieties by 2015, Cortland in 1915 and Macoun in 1923 among them⁷; Empire followed in the mid-1960s⁶. In 2010 Cornell released NY 1, a Honeycrisp offspring, and NY 2 to New York growers only, under a licence with an industry group whose members committed to plant more than 380 ha⁸; both were patented in 2011⁷. Geneva also keeps one of the world’s great apple collections, begun by Emmet S. Goff in 1883 with 700 varieties⁶. The USDA’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit there now holds 6,079 unique accessions of 55 species and hybrids, among them wild Malus sieversii gathered in Kazakhstan between 1989 and 1996⁹.

What’s picked

In 2025 New York had about 18,600 ha of bearing orchard and produced about 677,000 tonnes of apples for sale or use, 14% of the United States’ commercial crop and second only to Washington, worth $352 million; the crop was 17% larger than in 2024, though in 2023 Michigan had produced more¹⁰. More of New York’s crop is processed than sold fresh: 393,000 tonnes against 285,000 in 2025¹⁰, and over five seasons the fresh share has averaged closer to half¹⁴.

New York grows more than 20 commercial varieties, McIntosh, Gala, Honeycrisp, Empire, Fuji, Cortland and Granny Smith among them¹⁶, and an industry forecast put McIntosh, Gala and Rome together at 31% of the 2025/26 crop¹⁴. In the Hudson Valley the commonest trees were McIntosh, Red Delicious and Empire, but new plantings were almost all Gala, Honeycrisp and Fuji². In 1995 five Geneva varieties, Cortland, Empire, Jonagold, Jonamac and Macoun, made up almost a fifth of the state’s production⁶.

Picking begins with early varieties in late August¹⁵. In the Hudson Valley apples are picked in September and October², and in 2025, an early year, the state’s harvest was expected to be largely over by the end of October¹⁴.

On the table

The colonists dried apples and drank hard cider¹. Beach describes old farm orchards that went to cider, boiled cider, vinegar and drying, with the kitchen stove “surrounded with festoons of quartered fruit”, and Dutchess County orchards kept for cider brandy, “apple-jack”³. In the Hudson Valley, autumn “Apple Cuts” brought young people together to prepare apples for sauce and pies². Drying became an industry on the Lake Ontario shore: in 1896 the township of Sodus, in Wayne County, had about 400 evaporators, and some 1,500 carloads of dried apples left the county³.

New York now makes about 19 million litres of hard cider a year, more than any other state by Cornell’s count¹⁶, and many orchards open for pick-your-own, with cider pressing, farm stores and doughnut shops¹⁵. The apple became the State fruit in 1976 and, after a campaign by schoolchildren, the apple muffin the state muffin in 1987¹.

Notes

• Beach’s The Apples of New York (1905) described more than 1,000 varieties².
• The original Newtown Pippin tree died “from excessive cutting of cions and exhaustion”⁴.
• About 2,600 ha of the census’s apple area were young trees not yet bearing¹¹.

Where the sources disagree

• Stuyvesant’s tree. The Cornell account of the Hudson Valley says Governor Stuyvesant’s tree of 1647, at Third Avenue and 13th Street, was an apple from Holland²; Beach, quoting the USDA’s Taylor, says it was a pear, the Summer Bonchretien, which stood until 1866³.
• Geneva’s founding. The same account dates the station to 1870²; Cornell AgriTech gives the act of 26 June 1880⁵.
• Pell’s orchard. The Cornell account has it established in 1820–1825²; Beach says Ulster’s commercial planting began then, with Pell exporting from 1825 to 1830³.
• The end of the season. New York Agriculture in the Classroom says late varieties mature through the autumn “and even into early winter”¹⁵; the months here end in October, as in the Hudson Valley account and the 2025 outlook^2,14.
• Estimates. Tonnes and hectares are converted from NASS’s imperial units; the 14% share and Wayne County’s 44% are computed from its tables^10,11. The regional shares are of all fruit, about 2008². No official statistics of New York’s apples by variety were found, so the varieties list follows the industry forecast¹⁴ and Cornell’s lists^2,16.