The World of Apples

Growing regions

Washington State

Desert valleys east of the Cascades, watered by snowmelt rivers, that grow two-thirds of the US apple crop

How apples came

Around 1826 apple seeds reached Fort Vancouver, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trading post on the Columbia. One story has a woman at a London dinner slipping them into a young company man’s pocket; the plainest credits a ship’s captain, Aemilius Simpson. The planting is dated between 1825 and 18281. The National Park Service thinks the seed of the fort’s “Old Apple Tree” had germinated by 1827. A plaque of 1911 called it the oldest in the Northwest, and when it died on 25 June 2020, shoots from its roots and clones in the rebuilt fort orchard carried it on2. Settlers brought grafted saplings over the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, but east of the Cascades the dry sagebrush country, far from markets, waited for irrigation and railways until the 1890s1.

At Wenatchee, Philip Miller set out apple trees in 1872, and the first commercial orchard went in in 18843. The Great Northern Railway arrived on 17 October 18924, the first carload of apples left for Seattle in 19013, and in 1904 William T. Clark’s Highline Canal, about 26 km long, brought water to some 3,600 ha of benches along the Wenatchee River4. The Yakima Valley had shipped its first railway car of apples in 1894, and central Washington’s bearing apple trees numbered 346,804 in 1900 and close to a million by 19101. From 1902 Wenatchee called itself the “Apple Capital of the World”3,4.

The growers competed on quality: where eastern apples went to market in barrels, theirs were graded, wrapped in paper and packed in labelled wooden boxes, and in 1937 the legislature created a growers’ advertising commission funded by a levy of one cent a box. By the 1920s Washington had passed New York as the leading apple state, and by 1960 Red Delicious and Golden Delicious made up 80% of its apples1. In 1986 Red Delicious alone still covered three-quarters of the apple acreage5.

How they’re grown

The orchards lie in the rain shadow of the Cascades, in a dry climate whose scant rain falls mostly in winter. The sunny summers keep diseases down, but every orchard has to be irrigated, mostly with mountain snowmelt6. Yakima’s airport station averaged about 207 mm of precipitation a year from 1946 to 20167. Orchards in the lower Yakima Valley and Columbia Basin, at about 200 to 260 m, bloom up to four weeks before the highest ones, at about 900 m in north-central Washington6.

NASS’s census of January 2017 counted about 72,500 ha of apple orchard: about 27,970 ha in the Yakima Valley (Kittitas, Yakima and Benton counties), 26,270 in the Columbia Basin (Grant, Adams and Franklin), 13,770 in the Wenatchee district (Chelan, Douglas and Okanogan) and 4,490 elsewhere. Yakima County had the most, Grant nearly as much5. The federal Columbia Basin Project first delivered water from Grand Coulee Dam in spring 1952 and now serves about 271,500 ha8.

Planting has grown denser. A 1960 growers’ pamphlet recommended about 270 trees a hectare1; the 2017 average was about 1,745, and about 2,040 in the Columbia Basin5. Since the 1990s most new orchards have been dwarf trees on trellises, about 3 m tall, which bear in their second season6, and platforms that carry the pickers spread after 20059. Since the Bracero programme of 1943 Wenatchee’s growers have relied largely on Mexican workers4; industry estimates put the seasonal harvest workforce at 40,000 to 50,000, some 20,000 of them on H-2A guest-worker visas9.

Washington State University’s Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center at Wenatchee grew out of a growers’ campaign begun in 1921 and a law signed on 25 February 193710. The university’s breeders raised WA 38 from a cross of Enterprise and Honeycrisp, grown in a greenhouse at Wenatchee and selected in a Douglas County test orchard; the patent, granted in 2014, notes that it stays crisp through five months of ordinary storage11. It reached the shops in 20191.

What’s picked

In 2025 Washington had about 69,200 ha of bearing apple trees and produced about 3.25 million tonnes for sale or use, two-thirds of the United States’ commercial crop, worth $1.885 billion; yields averaged about 49 tonnes a hectare12. About 1,260 growers farmed apples in 2020, on orchards averaging some 40 ha1.

Red Delicious made up 46% of the state’s fresh apples in 2000/019, and Gala passed it in 20191. The 2017 census put Gala on 23% of the acreage, Red Delicious on 22%, Fuji on 16%, Honeycrisp on 13% and Granny Smith on 9%5. Of the 2024/25 fresh crop, by the growers’ association’s count, Gala made up 19.7%, Red Delicious 14.7%, Granny Smith 13.6%, Honeycrisp 10.9%, Fuji 9.8%, WA 38 9.2%, Cripps Pink 7.7%, Scilate 4.1% and Golden Delicious 3.4%13.

Picking starts in August, peaks in September or early October, and can run into November14. Red Delicious is usually picked in one pass; Honeycrisp, which ripens unevenly, may need four or five9. Every apple is picked by hand, and since the mid-1950s controlled-atmosphere stores have kept the crop crisp enough to sell in spring and summer1. In 2024/25, 29.3% of the crop was exported, most of it to Mexico, then Canada, Taiwan, India and Vietnam, and Washington grows more than 90% of the country’s organic apples13.

On the table

Of the 2025 crop, 2.57 million tonnes went to the fresh market and 0.68 million to processing12. In 1944 Bill Charbonneau, a juice salesman from Portland, bought a plant at Selah in the Yakima Valley to press culls, the small or blemished apples that had been dumped in rivers or landfill; his Tree Top juice was a growers’ co-operative by 19711. Spokane’s National Apple Show, held from 1908 to 1917, drew up to 100,000 people in a year1. The Washington State Apple Blossom Festival began in Wenatchee over a weekend in early May 1920, the idea of Susan Wagner, who had known such festivals in her native New Zealand4; it now runs for eleven days15. Each October the park around the old tree in Vancouver holds an Old Apple Tree Festival2.

Notes

  • Genetic tests point to a possible link between the Old Apple Tree and Reinette Franche, a French variety of the 1500s2.
  • The Wenatchee Daily World has carried “The Apple Capital of the World” on its masthead since 26 August 19253.
  • The Wenatchee Valley was declared an “economically stricken area” in 19351.
  • NASS counts only commercial orchards, those with 100 or more bearing trees12.

Where the sources disagree

  • Peterson or Patterson. The city’s history, drawing on a 1926 thesis, calls the 1884 orchard the Peterson orchard3; HistoryLink, quoting the Wenatchee historian Al Bright (1988), the Patterson orchard1.
  • The railway. HistoryLink’s apple essay says rail did not reach the Wenatchee Valley until 19011; its history of Wenatchee has the Great Northern arriving in October 18924, and the city dates the Stevens Pass line to 1893 and the first carload of apples to 19013.
  • The first festival. HistoryLink, the city and the festival give 19203,4,15, though the festival also dates its Grand Parade to “the Festival’s beginning in 1919”15.
  • Fort Vancouver. Accounts date the planting from 1825 to 18281; the Park Service puts germination by 18272.
  • Estimates. Tonnes and hectares are converted from NASS’s imperial units, and the two-thirds share is computed from its 2025 table12; the elevations are converted from the 2001 crop profile6. The 2017 shares are of orchard area5, those for 2024/25 of the fresh crop13. The harvest months are a statewide account14.
  • Left out. Washington State University’s accounts date the WA 38 cross to 1997 but carry the trade name in their titles, so are not cited; the patent gives only relative years11.
Washington State
Where Washington State is.

Sources

  1. Apple Farming in Washington, Jim Kershner, HistoryLink.org, essay 21288, 6 September 2021. Supports: seeds at Fort Vancouver around 1826, the stories of their arrival and the 1825–1828 range; grafted saplings over the Oregon Trail in the 1840s; the sagebrush country waiting for irrigation and railways; the Patterson orchard of 1884, quoting Bright; the first Yakima car of apples in 1894; 346,804 bearing trees in 1900 and nearly a million in 1910; grading, paper wrapping, labelled boxes against eastern barrels; the 1937 commission and its one cent a box; overtaking New York by the 1920s; Red and Golden Delicious at 80% by 1960; the 1960 pamphlet's 108 trees to the acre; Gala ahead of Red Delicious in 2019; WA 38 on the market in 2019; about 1,260 growers and orchards averaging about 100 acres in 2020; picking by hand; controlled-atmosphere storage from the mid-1950s for spring and summer sales; the Selah plant of 1944, culls dumped in rivers or landfill, the co-operative by 1971; the Spokane National Apple Show of 1908–1917 and its 100,000 visitors; the 1935 "economically stricken area"; rail "until 1901".
  2. Requiem for the 1820s Fort Vancouver Apple Tree, and a New Dawn, National Park Service, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Supports: the seed thought to have germinated by 1827; the 1911 plaque naming it the oldest apple tree in the Northwest; death on 25 June 2020; root suckers and the clones in the reconstructed orchard; the Old Apple Tree Festival each October; the possible link to Reinette Franche.
  3. Wenatchee is the Apple Capital of the World, Chris Rader, Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center, in Confluence (spring 2007), City of Wenatchee, 2007. Supports: Philip Miller's trees of 1872; the Peterson orchard of 1884 as the first commercial planting; the Great Northern line over Stevens Pass in 1893; the first carload of apples to Seattle in 1901; the slogan from 1902; the Wenatchee Daily World masthead from 26 August 1925; the festival held each spring since 1920.
  4. Wenatchee: Thumbnail History, Laura Arksey, HistoryLink.org, essay 8634, 2008. Supports: the Great Northern's arrival on 17 October 1892; W. T. Clark's 16-mile Highline Canal of 1904, reclaiming 9,000 acres of benches along the Wenatchee River; the "Apple Capital" name from 1902; the first festival on the first weekend of May 1920 and Susan Wagner of New Zealand; the Bracero programme from 1943 and Mexican labour since.
  5. Washington Tree Fruit Acreage Report 2017, USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Northwest Regional Field Office, November 2017. Supports: apple acres on 1 January 2017: 179,146 in all, Yakima Valley 69,117, Columbia Basin 64,910, Wenatchee 34,021, other areas 11,098; the reporting areas' counties (map, p. 5); Yakima County 51,690, Grant 49,862, Okanogan 18,194; acres by variety (Gala 41,036, Red Delicious 39,207, Fuji 28,718, Honeycrisp 22,616, Granny Smith 16,267); Red Delicious 121,175 of 160,980 acres in 1986; 706 trees per acre on average and 825 in the Columbia Basin.
  6. Crop Profile for Apples in Washington, Washington State University contributors, Crop Profile/PMSP database supported by USDA NIFA, June 2001. Supports: the moderate, marine-influenced desert climate with scant winter rain; irrigation largely from midsummer snowmelt; low disease pressure; orchards at 650–850 ft in the lower Columbia Basin and Yakima Valley blooming three or four weeks before those at 3,000 ft in north-central Washington; replanting quickening in the 1990s; new trellised orchards on dwarfing rootstock, bearing in their second season, trees about 10 ft tall.
  7. Yakima Air Terminal, Washington (459465): period of record monthly climate summary, Western Regional Climate Center. Supports: average total precipitation of 8.13 inches a year over the period of record, 1946–2016.
  8. Columbia Basin Project, Bureau of Reclamation, Grand Coulee Dam. Supports: first water from Grand Coulee Dam in spring 1952; about 671,000 acres served.
  9. Supplement to Adjusting to Higher Labor Costs in Selected U.S. Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Industries: Case Studies (AP-103), Linda Calvin, Philip Martin and Skyler Simnitt, USDA Economic Research Service, July 2022. Supports: Red Delicious at 46% of Washington's fresh apples in 2000/01; single-pass Red Delicious and up to four or five passes for unevenly ripening Honeycrisp; picking platforms spreading after 2005; 40,000 to 50,000 seasonal harvest workers including 20,000 H-2A guest workers.
  10. History of the Center, Washington State University Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center, Wenatchee. Supports: the growers' movement of 1921 and the bill signed on 25 February 1937.
  11. Apple tree named 'WA 38' (US Plant Patent PP24,210), Bruce H. Barritt, Washington State University Research Foundation; Google Patents, 4 February 2014. Supports: a seedling of Enterprise and Honeycrisp grown in a greenhouse at Wenatchee and selected from an evaluation orchard in Douglas County; little loss of crispness, sugar and acid after five months in common storage; the patent granted in 2014; relative years only.
  12. Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts 2025 Summary, USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, May 2026. Supports: Washington in 2025: 171,000 bearing acres, 44,100 pounds an acre, 7,163.0 million pounds sold or used of a national 10,718.5 million, 5,655.0 million fresh and 1,508.0 million processed, value $1,885,000,000; commercial orchards defined as those with 100 or more bearing trees.
  13. Apple Fact Sheet, Northwest Horticultural Council, citing the Washington State Tree Fruit Association's statistical review of 2024/25, 26 January 2026. Supports: shares of the 2024/25 fresh crop by variety (Gala 19.7%, Red Delicious 14.7%, Granny Smith 13.6%, Honeycrisp 10.9%, Fuji 9.8%, WA 38 9.2%, Cripps Pink 7.7%, Scilate 4.1%, Golden Delicious 3.4%); 29.3% exported in 2024/25 and the leading markets; more than 90% of the US organic apple crop.
  14. 2013 Agricultural Workforce Report, Washington State Employment Security Department, May 2015. Supports: the apple harvest beginning in August, peaking in September or early October and extending into November, weather permitting.
  15. History of the Washington State Apple Blossom Festival, Washington State Apple Blossom Festival. Supports: the festival's eleven days; 1920 as the year it began, and the Grand Parade dated to "the Festival's beginning in 1919".