BY ROGER SMITH
MOUNTAIN CITIZEN
DAVELLA — Once a barren coal mine, a mountain-top site in Martin County has been transformed into a flourishing apple orchard. On Saturday and Sunday, Ryan Wilson and his wife Andrea, managers of AppleAtcha Orchards, set up a bustling farmers market along Airport Road. The couple sold bags and bushels of Honeycrisp apples, a sweet variety that has drawn significant local interest.
“We were bagging them while people were waiting at one point,” Ryan Wilson recounted. “Everything we picked is pretty much gone.”
AppleAtcha AgriTech, spearheaded by Inez businessman Jim Booth, planted 120,000 trees across 60 acres that rest 1,100 feet above sea level in 2021. Three years later, Charles Hamm, the CEO, described the harvest as a “partial” yield from the still-young trees.
“Next year we should be getting closer to what I call a ‘full harvest,’” Hamm explained. “We should probably end up with about 800 to 1,000 bins of apples. There are 19 bushels in a bin.”
Following the orchard’s initial success, AppleAtcha is planning to expand, adding 100 acres and 200,000 more trees. The company has secured $7 million in loans that include a $3.5 million Kentucky Agricultural Development Fund loan matched by a private loan.
“Our ultimate goal is 500 acres,” Hamm stated.
He added that the construction of a $14 million packhouse is also underway, which will streamline the sorting and distribution of apples to major grocery store chains within a 100-mile radius.
For now, the local community and schools will benefit from this year’s harvest, as transporting the apples elsewhere is not yet cost-effective.
Hamm highlighted the orchard’s unique approach, with a density of 2,000 trees per acre, leading to higher overall yields.
“There is little more labor but you get more yield,” Hamm said. “You have fewer trees, you’ll get a few more apples on each tree. But with more trees, you have many more trees to give many more apples. We believe this is cutting-edge and is becoming more popular now.”
The orchard is also poised to integrate advanced technology, including robotics.
“There is a machine that goes up and down the rows and takes millions of pictures,” Hamm elaborated. “You do that throughout the season, and it tells you the growth rate and estimates how many apples you’re going to get. A lot of things come out of those millions of pictures.”
The community’s response has been overwhelmingly positive.
“We’re getting a lot of phone calls from people wanting to come up and get apples,” Hamm said. “And on any given Sunday there are cars parked all around it and people just looking at it.”
Hamm projects the packhouse will employ about 40-45 people at an average wage of $20 to $25 per hour.
“The orchard, we’re going to use as many local people as like to work out in the sun,” he said. “But we will have to complement that with migrants as well.”
Processing the apples will involve two main components: controlled atmospheric storage, which can keep apples fresh for up to a year, and a pack line with an AI system to sort the apples.
“You could pull them out and it’s like they just came off the tree,” Hamm explained. The system will detect even the smallest scars and sort the apples accordingly.
The processing facility is expected to be operational by the 2025 harvest.
Hamm, who wrote the mining reclamation bond for the property, expressed pride in the project’s transformation from a coal mine to a productive farm.
“We’re pretty excited. We’re taking an area that was mined for coal. Everybody had good jobs and life was good. Then, in that particular area, things went the other way,” he said. “Now we’re converting this land into something much more useful. What I hear people locally telling me is, ‘It’s taking us back before coal.’”
In a broader vision, Hamm said, AppleAtcha’s nonprofit partner, Community at the Core, will ultimately teach residents to grow small orchards, enabling them to bring their apples to the packhouse for processing.
“You could take your backyard. If you have an acre, you could put up to 2,000 of our trees on that acre,” Hamm said. “There are a lot of ways to complement your family’s income.”