- I'm Tyler Harper.

As your agriculture commissioner, I have the honor of representing one of the hardest working groups of people in our state, our farmers.

That's why we invite you to take the Georgia Grown Challenge.

Try any Georgia specialty crop against any other state's produce, and you'll pick Georgia grown.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Community, learning, working, playing, celebrating, doing life is always better together.

At GPB, we aim to provide you with the tools to be able to do life together well.

Our mission to educate, inform, and entertain inspires everything from our wide range of programming, to our stimulating radio conversations, to our fun in-person events, we've got something for everyone.

Visit gpb.org/community to learn more about our upcoming events.

- I'm Tyler Harper.

As your agriculture commissioner, I have the honor of representing one of the hardest working groups of people in our state, our farmers.

That's why we invite you to take the Georgia Grown Challenge.

Try any Georgia specialty crop against any other state's produce, and you'll pick Georgia grown.

- The fascinating and ever-changing world of agriculture.

Let's hit the road here in Georgia and meet the farmers, producers, makers, and bakers who keep us all fed and keep us coming back for more.

Straight ahead at "A Fork in the Road."

(uplifting music) ♪ I came from the mud ♪ ♪ There's dirt on my hands ♪ ♪ Strong like a tree, there's roots where I stand ♪ Georgia farmers, artisans, merchants and producers, we depend on these men and women every day of our lives through the choices we make and the food we consume.

Their strategy and approach is always shifting, but the end game remains the same, results.

(upbeat music) Peaches are legendary here in Georgia.

Yes, we are the Peach State, and though we may not be known as the Big Apple down here, there are parts of Georgia that are known for their delicious apple varieties, along with apple cider, apple bread, hot apple pie.

The list goes on.

This episode explores these precious orchards of Georgia.

From the mountains to the coastal plains, we go.

Let's begin this episode down in Fort Valley where a long time peach growing family shares a few tales of the past, along with present day peach farming tips and a glimpse of its future.

(energetic music) Welcome to the Peach State.

Now, Georgia has a rich history of peach production, as we will soon learn, but this fruit did not originally grow in the southern United States.

Now, even though the scientific name for peach, Prunus persica, literally means Persian plum, genetic research dates that the first peaches originated not in the Persian region, now known as Iran, but instead in China around 6,000 BC.

Fast forward to the 16th century when Europeans introduced them to Georgia's barrier islands, they soon realized that the climate was perfect for growing these fruitful trees.

And then after the Civil War, when Georgia farmers were looking for an alternative to cotton, that's when the marketing, production, and distribution of Georgia peaches really caught steam.

(train engine toots) The Pearson family of Pearson Farm has been growing, harvesting and selling peaches since 1885, and continues this proud family tradition to this day.

Lawton Pearson and his cousin Will McGehee take us on a journey of the famous Georgia peach.

- My name's Lawton Pearson.

I'm a fifth generation peach grower from Fort Valley, Georgia.

The peach industry started right around Fort Valley.

That's why we're in Peach County.

It was named Peach County back in the 1930s because it was the center of Georgia peach production.

Back in the late 1800s in a town not far from here, a peach was found called the Elberta that they were able to ship to New York.

And from that they started growing tons and tons of them because they could sell the for $15 a bushel in New York in 1886.

That was a king's ransom back then.

Because of that, everybody started coming down here to plant peach trees, including my great-great-grandfather who moved here in 1885 and started growing peaches among other things.

(gentle music) - My mother was Ann Pearson McGehee.

She was a Pearson.

She's fourth generation.

I'm fifth generation.

This was her grandparents' house, the porch we're sitting on right now, and peach farming is in our blood.

Where we're talking today is kind of the epicenter of where our family started growing peaches since 1885.

You see behind me, this was the old Lee Pope Hotel, and it's historical in the fact that peaches require so much hand labor in a very short amount of time.

We only need you for about 100 days during the summer, and then what do you do the rest of the year?

And so what had to happen is each farm had to build what we called a hotel.

It's basically a boarding house where kids would come to Fort Valley each summer, and they would room together and they would meet each other here, and we would send someone to the railroad downtown.

We would have a sign, you know, "Need 12 today," and carloads of kids would come to Fort Valley because this is where the summer work was.

And you'd live in that place for six or seven weeks meeting folks you'd never seen before.

You'd work in peaches together, kind of like a summer camp, but you get paid.

The walls in there are actually signed in some of the rooms where kids would meet, and this is where they stayed.

There'd be 32 girls and 32 boys.

Girls on the bottom floor, boys on the top floor.

- [David] These hotel walls have stood the test of time, as Will and any building preservation expert will tell you, you keep the roof up to date, the rest of the house will last a whole lot longer.

- Well, we have these old ledger books of receipts of peaches picked and packed from years ago.

So these are some canceled checks from 1913 of who the Pearsons were writing checks to.

Just a neat little slice of Georgia history.

You know, this is kind of where it began for our family and are proud of our heritage, we are.

Georgia Peach is iconic, whether you go to Minnesota, California, Florida, Canada, wherever you go and you say the word peach, the next word out of everybody's mouth is, "Oh, are you from Georgia?"

And it's kind of a neat thing.

It's kind of our signature fruit for the state, and we're just honored to be a part of that legacy.

We have a special climate here in Georgia where there's a lot of peaches grown in other places, but peaches from Georgia are special for several different reasons.

We grow in this amazing red clay here in middle Georgia where our orchards are, and the clay gives the peaches so much goodness and nutrients, and it's a great place to grow trees, first of all.

- We grow over 50 varieties in production on my farm, and have 20 or 30 more in trials.

There are hundreds of thousands of varieties of peaches through the ages.

They're all different.

They all have their own personalities.

They ripen at different times.

So when we're picking peaches, it really requires an experienced eye.

So you have to know what variety you're picking at the time.

And you want the background of this peach.

This is Augustprince.

You want this, this is lime green.

You want this to be creamy yellow.

There's some peaches that are completely red, 90% red maybe, but they'll still have a background color that is more yellow.

That's the difference right there.

That creamy yellow and that bright green.

This peach is good, it's fantastic.

This peach needs four or five more days.

The problem is, once I pick it, this peach gets no more sugar in it.

It's as sweet as it's gonna get when I pick it.

All it's gonna do is is ripen.

So I don't wanna be this.

This may be just right.

I miss it by day and I lose it.

So we spend a lot of time talking and training, what's the right time to pick a peach?

And it's different for every variety.

That's what we're constantly working with the guys is their eyes, somewhat their hands.

Our first description of a peach is not when it comes off, it's not how red it is, it's how it tastes.

And if it doesn't taste good, it's pointless.

We don't need to grow it.

- You guys just got done out in the orchard seeing all the picking.

So now this is what happens after they come in from the orchard.

Peaches get pretty hot out there.

Our goal here is to get them cooled down and stop the ripening process.

Each bin rolls through and after about 40 minutes, the peaches have cooled down to around 38 to 40 degrees.

So here are on the other end of the water tunnel.

The peaches have had a nice bath, and this peach is now about 38 degrees.

So this area is how we get the peaches out of the bins.

We've got about 900 pounds of peaches in each bin, but we need to get them out in a very gentle manner.

And so the machine you see over here behind me is it's actually an Italian machine where they dump apples in this machine, very gentle way to exit.

They take the bin, they invert the bin, it goes up about four inches about every three seconds, and the peaches just kind of trickle out onto this belt and flow in to get graded.

(light rock music) As you can see, when the peaches come out of the bin, I've got a lot of different sized peaches.

And there are some peaches, there are some peaches that are just way bigger than the other.

So we've got some larges, we've got some mediums, and we've got some smalls.

And so we've got a different customer group for every size peach we grow.

And I'll tell you about who gets the different size peaches a little bit later.

So what we've got here is our very first line of defense.

We're gonna start grading the peaches.

We want to take out matter that is not a peach.

So any kind of sticks or leaves, maybe any peaches that got bumped or cut on the ride in, we wanna make sure we get them out before we put them through the machines.

And so these folks here are our very first hands that get to discern what's good, what's bad, and they're looking all day long, they're watching.

You see that leaf right here?

He's taking off the leaf.

We're gonna grab that leaf and put it down the pipe.

We got a little baby peach that decided to grow on it.

We're gonna take that off and throw that down and throw it there.

Sometimes after a big rainstorm, the peach grows a little too fast.

When that happens, you'll see this crack open up right here.

It's called a growth crack.

Not very appetizing.

So that becomes the number two for us.

I'll show you about the number twos later.

Now we've got our graded peaches coming into the washer.

What I'm trying to do is get all of the stuff that's on the outside of the peach that's not appetizing off the peach.

And so we put them in these nozzles here and these brushes are extremely soft.

They're very soft to the touch, but their whole goal is to make this peach where it's edible when you pick it up out of the box.

This is just natural water from a well coming up out of the earth.

And this is how we clean our peaches every day.

Every peach gets rolled and washed through here.

(upbeat music) This is our first step in the process where the 21st century technology comes into farming.

Everything from this point backwards the same way my dad did it, my granddad, my great-grandfather, and my great-great-grandfather.

I'm not sure they would know what to do with this machine right here.

This thing is pretty sweet.

It's called an InScan Pulse scanner.

As the peaches come down the belt and singulate, every single peach gets in a cup and it goes up underneath this machine, and nine photos are taken and scans of every single peach.

As the peach rotates one full turn, it takes nine different photos and it sees through the peach, it sees the exterior grade and infrared sees through the peach.

So now I know on a computer program exactly what that cup is carrying from a grade.

Each peach has its own cup, and it rides, it rides, it stops here, it goes up under this machine, and that machine measures the circumference of the peach in millimeters.

And when it gets past this machine here, it also goes on a scale.

So I've got how many grams it is and how many millimeters wide, and that determines what box I get to put them in.

This is something nobody has ever seen coming, and this is quite a machine.

This is very cool add to our packing house.

(energetic music) So what we've got here is the final grade of the peaches.

We have what we call the downgrade belt here, and the number one grade belt here.

So anything that's on this belt over here, our handy dandy machine has said there's a little something wrong with it.

So we drop it on this machine, and it made a good grade right here.

We want to get that out of every one of them.

Now, it's not garbage.

We're able to sell it at about a half price, but it goes into our number two box.

Meanwhile, if he feels anything soft, we've got this awesome lazy river.

You see the water up underneath us.

When he feels something soft, he puts it right here.

It goes down in the river and off the peach floats all the way through the packing house and back up into the dump truck.

And that gets any sort of rot and mold, mildew, anything that we don't want contaminating the rest of the process.

It gets it in the water and out of the packing house so we don't have to carry it out dripping all over the place.

Over here, these are our number one peaches.

This is why we're growing the peaches.

We're trying to get nice ripe peaches that are still firm to the market.

On this belt are our number one.

(bouncy music) Our Aweta InScan technology has determined that we've got some soft peaches that are ready to eat right now.

What's happening here is we are hand selecting what I consider is the best, most delicious peaches we have on our farm is right here.

So if you look.

(fans whirring) That is so good.

When you cut that peach open, absolutely gorgeous, perfectly ripe.

My problem is I can't send soft peaches to the market.

Lunch rooms, grocery stores, club stores, they will not accept peaches that are ripe and juicy and leaking water.

But I got a lot of flavor right here.

So what we're trying to do is capture the flavor of these amazing peaches right here without putting them on the market.

So I want to take you to the back and show you how we're capturing all this flavor for the school systems.

This is what I'm trying to eliminate, right?

These are peaches that just got a little too soft on the tree.

And in order for the majority of your peaches to be ripe and hard, you're gonna have a small percentage of peaches that get through that you just missed by about a day.

And so in order to pick 98% perfect, you gotta be willing to give away the 2 to 3%.

However, I feel like we can get a market for these peaches, and that's what we're working on with the slice program.

One of the main problems with slicing machines is they have to be fed a very consistent firm peach every peach after peach.

So it doesn't really do great for soft juicy peaches.

It does great for hard, unripe peaches.

Well, we want to capture the flavor of that soft peach.

And in order to do that, you just gotta have hands, you gotta have humans.

You have to have somebody that at the moment of discernment, they'll take out the little bad wedge that might have a little spot on it and they take that out.

And then the other 81% of that peach are perfect slices.

So we're doing everything in this room by hand and taking it that last little percent into bags.

Lemme show you how we're doing it.

So first we peel peaches, we got a little peeler, whoop.

She took out a little spot right here, and she's able to cut around and get nice ripe.

This is where the flavor is.

When you see that bright red, the bright yellow, the bright sherbet orange, those are the colors of a nice bright peach.

All right, so we measure it out.

We put them in our nice bags here, perfectly sliced peaches.

Put a little bit of fruit fresh on here to preserve that color.

Which is, fruit fresh is the method of keeping the peaches fresh and colorful.

Naturally, a peach after you slice it, when it oxidizes, it turns brown, which is not very appetizing.

You put the fruit fresh mixture on top of it, it keeps it nice, bright and fresh.

And now we gotta make sure we have the right pounds inside the bag.

(twangy music) So this is a bag vacuum sealer.

So we are basically going to be sealing the bag.

And there we are.

So now we've got a fresh vacuum seal bag of five pounds of peaches.

Each one of our bags are gonna be flash frozen, and then we're gonna put two of these bags in a case.

And inside the lunch room comes a case of two of these five pound bags.

(upbeat music) These are the perfect size peaches for our lunch rooms.

Now, this peach was hanging on a tree this morning.

It was pit, washed, and grated.

Now it's in a box right now, this is before lunch.

We've got a truck coming in about an hour, and they will be loaded on a truck headed to Atlanta within about four hours of hanging on a tree.

That's how fast and fresh this fruit is going to the school system.

(upbeat music) I'm here with my Uncle Al Pearson, the patriarch here at Pearson Farms, and I want Uncle Al to kind of explain the story of the world's largest peach we got.

- We had a picker that picked this peach, and he didn't put it in his bag.

He took it to his crew leader, and the crew leader took it to the supervisor, and the supervisor brought it to the packing shed and Will said, "I wonder what it weighs."

So they weighed and then Will said, "I wonder what the world record is."

And so it weighed 1.8 pounds.

They looked up the world record, and it was 1.75.

So we contacted Guinness, and they told us what we needed to do to certify the scales.

And it turned out that we had weighed it accurately.

And so we were awarded the distinction of the world's heaviest peach.

And I thought we would get a whole page in the Guinness catalog, and we didn't quite get a whole page.

We got a line.

- [Will] We're told that packing houses all across the southeast, they got one guy standing there all day long trying to beat this record, and nobody's been able to beat it in the last seven years.

So we're just going to keep the record right here.

- [Al] Right here, it was a lot of fun.

- We made a cobbler out of it.

- Yeah.

- And ate the cobbler.

- Right.

- It was good.

(upbeat music fades) (uplifting music) - [David] Let's now journey through the mountains of Blue Ridge, Georgia to explore the apples of Mercier Orchards and meet two generations of family members who have helped grow this farm over the decades.

(upbeat music) Over 2,500 varieties of apples are grown in the United States, but only one, the crab apple, is native to North America.

These rolling hills have been home to the deciduous apple trees of Mercier Orchards since 1943.

A humble business that began in this old shack has grown into the popular farm store and packing house that we see today.

And the business of apples has stayed in the Mercier family every step of the way.

(upbeat music) - My dad came here as a county agricultural agent working for the University of Georgia at the time.

He bought a small orchard, which was about 25 acres, centered around the old building up here on top of the hill and started developing the orchard that my mother and dad did in the early '40s.

Then dad as an agronomist went on to work in the basin, reclaiming some of that land.

And my mother was primarily the one that was selling the apples and running things for a long time.

That was Adele.

I'm very fortunate that the third generation is now on board.

They're now running the farm.

And I'm tickled pink because I've been very blessed to have two good son-in-laws with great talents, and they're going to take it the next 80 years I hope.

- Being part of this family is special to me.

Born and raised in the area, not having a whole lot of opportunities that I probably wouldn't have seen in life.

The guidance from Tim Mercier for the last 20 years has been incredible.

I feel greatly blessed to be a part of this.

- [David] Explain a bushel.

- [Joe] A bushel, the standard unit of measure for all apple crops, you know, most crops.

We break everything down by the bushels when we're considering costs per bushel, we're considering price per bushel, we're considering our yield.

You know, everything is based on the bushel.

Four pecks make up a bushel.

We sell pecks and half pecks and half bushels.

Everything that we've been taught to think has all been in the grocery stores.

But when you come to the farm, we kind of hold dear to those traditional pecks, half pecks, half bushels and bushels.

Kind of differentiates us from the supermarket.

In the supermarket, you're buying everything by the pound.

- We try to grow about 50 varieties of apples.

Our idea is we want some apples for every season.

So we can pick apples in say mid-July, and we'll pick all the way through, usually up into the first part of November with different apples coming at different times of the season.

A lot of the early apples were apples grown more for processing for canning and applesauce and that type of stuff.

We've kind of gradually moved away from some of those varieties as people have changed the way they buy their food or utilize their food.

So now we're more into the varieties that are really good to eat, tastes good.

And they're different because they're changing all the time.

There's over 10,000 varieties of apples in the world, and we're trying to always grow some of the best.

So we're changing about 5% of the orchard every year.

And not just apples, we grow peaches, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, Chinese chokeberries, no telling what else.

No telling what else we'll be growing in a few years.

Even vegetables.

(upbeat music) Agriculture's a big growing changing business.

My dad said, "When you stop planting trees and stop changing the way you do business, you're going out of business, you just don't know it yet."

- [Joe] If you sit stagnant, if you're not willing to reach out and find new technologies, new ways of doing it, then you're falling behind.

- [Tim] Computers and technology are everything now.

The new systems that Ashley and them are planting, we can probably do on one acre what we used to do on five acres.

It's designed to maximize sunlight and all the water.

These systems are going to allow us to grow better apples on less land and will also then free up land to do other things.

(upbeat music) - We've had a lot of customers come through and the first time you witness somebody eating an apple first because it's funny, you think it's just the kids, it's their first time out, but you're out here with them and you're working with people and you realize that not only has the kid never been out on a farm, but neither has the parent.

So they haven't ever picked an apple off the tree.

So you witness them picking that apple for the first time off the tree, and they bite into it and they're like, "Why does it taste so good?

This is so much better than what I've ever had."

It's like, well, yeah, I mean, it's a Mercier apple, you know, but really it's a fresh apple.

You know, a lot of people don't have the privilege of being able to pick and eat a fresh apple right off the tree, and they don't realize just how crazy good that is.

- [David] So from a longtime apple orchard and farm store in the north Georgia mountains to a legendary peach farming family who successfully grew the world's largest peach, the orchards of Georgia boast an array of sweet, fruity varieties to visitors to their stores and beyond.

I'm David Zelski.

See you at the next "Fork in the Road."

(twangy music) "A Fork in the Road" was brought to you by.

- [Announcer] From produce to people, the best things are grown and raised in Georgia.

Even in tough times, we come together, work hard, and grow strong.

When you purchase Georgia grown products, you support farmers, families, and this proud state we call home.

Together, we will keep Georgia growing.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Community, learning, working, playing, celebrating, doing life is always better together.

At GPB, we aim to provide you with the tools to be able to do life together well.

Our mission to educate, inform, and entertain inspires everything from our wide range of programming, to our stimulating radio conversations, to our fun in-person events, we've got something for everyone.

Visit gpb.org/community to learn more about our upcoming events.