The Fruit Orchard Purge of 1916
As fruit growers in the Yakima Valley panic and rip out their orchards to plant alfalfa, one local paper warns that the cycle of boom and bust is as predictable as the rising sun.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Due in a large measure, it is claimed, to poor returns received from fruit and the generally demoralized condition of the marketing agencies, between 160 and 200 acres of fruit trees have been pulled out in the vicinity of Sunnyside during the past year. Satisfactory returns received from diversified farming have also helped to bring about this result. The trees were principally peach and apple of the varieties that come on in the glut of the market. Alfalfa and corn, of which there is already considerable acreage in the Yakima valley, are the main crops that will be grown on the land just denuded of trees.
The digging up of trees is a pastime that has been indulged in more or less by fruit growers in nearly all the fruit growing districts of the northwest for the past three years, and while not carried on everywhere perhaps to the extent that has prevailed in the Sunnyside district, it is said the total acreage is great. Whether the loss of tonnage in this way will be exceeded by that produced on the young orchards set out four or five years ago, and if so, how much, is a question that is furnishing much interest to fruit men. Certain it is that very few fruit trees have been set out in the last three or four years compared with the number set out prior to 1911. And if the practice of digging them up continues at the present rate, there is going to come a time in the not distant future when the fruit supply will not equal the demand, just as it failed to do in 1905, 1906, 1907 and 1908. That will be the golden harvest time for the man who has stayed with his trees, or rather, let his trees stay with him. These boom and depression periods in the value of all farm products follow each other with the persistence and certainty of night and day.
“These boom and depression periods in the value of all farm products follow each other with the persistence and certainty of night and day.”
The transition from orchard fruit to commodity crops like alfalfa reflects the ongoing tension in Washington's agricultural landscape, where market volatility forces farmers to pivot between high-value permanent crops and safer annuals. This 1916 editorial captures the exact anxiety felt by growers in the Columbia Basin today as they face changing water availability and global trade pressures.
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