By ALEX PIAZZA
NORTHPORT -- Inmates dressed in orange prison jackets hauled bushels filled with apples through a Leelanau County orchard.
The fruit isn't headed to a processor, farmers market or grocery store -- Michigan's bumper apple crop this fall took care of that. But it won't go to waste either, as Northport apple grower Stan Silverman found a home for part of his bounty after all.
Silverman plans to donate all of the apples picked Thursday to Forgotten Harvest, a mobile food rescue organization based in metro Detroit.
"There's a lot of people in our state who need help," said Silverman, who owns Good Neighbor Farms of Northport. "And there's a lot of food up here that gets dumped, and that's just plain wrong. There are always other things to do with the fruit."
While many apple farmers throughout the state have struggled to sell their fruit, Silverman refuses to waste his crop. He's donated apples to local food pantries in past years, but because many of them were already stocked, he decided to help out the struggling city of Detroit.
Fresh Food Partnership of Traverse City worked with Silverman and Forgotten Harvest to ensure the apples found a home.
"We have access to all of this fresh fruit and Detroit doesn't," said Dianne Navarro, Fresh Food Partnership program coordinator.
Forgotten Harvest plans to send a semi-truck to the five-acre orchard in Northport to pick up the apples.
"You can fit about 44,000 pounds of apples in one of them," Silverman said.
A flooded apple market, combined with a struggling economy, resulted in a tough selling season for most Michigan apple farmers.
But the fresh fruit market is in better shape than the processed fruit market, said Al Bakker, of Bakker's Acres north of Suttons Bay.
"The fresh market stuff that ends up in grocery stores is always a waiting game," Bakker said.
Apple quotas set by processors are about the same as last year, but many farmers have a larger crop this year, Bakker said.
Statewide, Michigan's apple crop is projected at 1.15 billion pounds, according to the Michigan Field Office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's up 92 percent from last year's state apple crop that tumbled because of spring frost damage.
Bakker said the long apple crop can be attributed to weather that at times was not ideal, but did not include hail or freezing temperatures.
Like Silverman, Bakker said he's been on the phone with food pantries to unload his overabundance of apples.
"If they can't take it, I'll have to leave it in the field," Bakker said.
That's in stark contrast to last year, when most apple farmers were scrounging for apples to sell, Bakker said.
Nine inmates from the Pugsley Correctional Facility near Kingsley helped pick the Detroit-bound apples at the Silverman farm. They are part of the prison's public works program that generally handles construction-related tasks, but several agreed picking apples was a nice change of pace.
"It's nice to get away from that negative energy," one inmate said.
While the prisoners stripped trees of their apples and loaded them into crates, they also tossed around rotted fruit and talked about possible fantasy football trades.
"They grumble and gripe every so often, but you know they're having a good time," said Alan Strange, one of two guards at the orchard. "There's a sense of fulfillment you see in these guys. A lot of them have never had that."
