—by Matt Milkovich
When Clayton Slaughter noticed the large volume of fruit left on the orchard floor during harvest, it bothered him. Some might see dropped apples as the cost of doing business in an orchard. Slaughter saw money being left on the table.
“If you ran a factory and left that much waste, you’d get fired,” he said. “Maybe they’re not beautiful grocery-store apples, but they’re perfectly good to press and ferment into hard cider.”
Slaughter, owner and cidermaker at Slaughter Orchard and Cidery in Indiana, said harvesting apples off the ground for hard-cider production is legal and feasible in the United States, but hardly any growers do it. With help from a $163,680 Specialty Crop Block Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he’s conducting a three-year project to demonstrate that dropped apples can be safely harvested, processed and fermented into hard cider.
Unlike in Europe, where hard-cider apples are routinely harvested off the ground by machine, a combination of food safety concerns and lower demand for hard cider discouraged ground harvest of apples in the United States. Many U.S. growers are interested in the practice, but they are leery of pushback from health departments, insurance companies and wholesale buyers who might not accept the perceived food safety risks — even though alcoholic fermentation is a safe and legal way to remove illness-causing microbes, Slaughter said.
“Harvesting off the ground is what most cidermakers in the world do, but it’s anathema in this country because of food safety worries,” said Steve Wood, owner of Farnum Hill Ciders in New Hampshire.
Wood has been ground-harvesting cider apples by hand for more than three decades. He knows a handful of other growers in the Northeast who ground-harvest by hand, too, but it’s not a common practice. He wasn’t familiar with Slaughter’s Indiana project, but he was happy to hear about it.
“He’s on the right track if he’s got the right fruit,” Wood said.
Slaughter, who’s also an attorney, said ground harvesting requires thorough records, a trained staff and a good Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points plan, which is a systematic approach to the identification, evaluation and control of food safety hazards. One of the goals of the grant-funded project is to create a model HACCP plan that can be shared with other growers after third-party testing and validation of its performance in his own orchards.
Slaughter Orchard grows about 35 acres of apples in two locations. Most of his apples are hand-picked off the branch. He and his workers ground-harvest specific varieties they use in hard-cider production, including McIntosh, Cortland, Winesap and both Red and Golden Delicious. They pick the apples off the ground by hand then load them into red bins to ensure the fruit is segregated from tree-harvested fruit. During 2024, the project’s second harvest, they ground-harvested about 220 bushels of apples, from which they will make about 660 gallons of hard cider. They plan tasting demonstrations this year, Slaughter said.
In a recent study, a team led by Cornell University horticulture professor Gregory Peck concluded that mechanical ground harvest in the European style is less expensive and more efficient than hand harvest from the tree. However, growers must ensure their orchards and harvest machinery are compatible and their buyers have the infrastructure to process bruised fruit in a short timeframe.
European manufacturers have reached out to Slaughter about using their machines, but picking off the ground by hand offers more efficiency for an operation of his size. Machine harvest requires high volumes of fruit, he said.
At Farnum Hill, Wood’s crews ground-harvest nearly two-thirds of their hard-cider apples, including bittersweet and bittersharp varieties. They pick them off the ground and sort the apples into bins by hand. Some of the apples go into their own hard cider, some are sold to other cidermakers around the country, he said.
Wood encourages grass to grow under his cider trees, so the apples fall onto a surface that has “fewer microbial issues than dirt,” he said. He understands the concerns about pathogens in ground-harvested apples, but he said the hard-cider production process virtually eliminates them.
“Almost everything is murdered in alcoholic fermentation,” he said.
Wood said cidermakers want “the last degree of ripeness” from their apples. He and his workers wait for cider apples to start dropping on their own, then they shake branches manually to get the rest to drop before picking the apples off the ground by hand.
“This is not us trying to be charming anachronists,” Wood said. “This is us trying to grow and put into bins the best cider apples that can be produced.” •
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