Back in the day, one could take a springtime drive from Hiawatha to St. Joseph, Mo., and see nothing but miles of white and pink apple blossoms.

As recently as the 1950s, a mother could have spent all day picking peaches with a dozen family members south of Wichita in the town Haysville, which was the self-proclaimed “Peach Capital of the World.”

And 50 years ago, a kid in Lawrence could marvel at the apple sorting house and refrigerated railroad cars that served the commercial orchards south of Sixth Street and Kasold Drive.

Now, some Kansas farmers and agriculture experts hope to return commercial fruit and vegetable farming to its former stature in northeast Kansas and perhaps the rest of the state.

“We’re geographically centered in the country. We still have a lot of open space. We have good soil and good water. We have access to a labor pool,” said Tom Warner, head of the horticulture department at Kansas State University for 19 years. “I see the central plains region being the ultimate food-providing region for our country.”

But in a state synonymous with wheat and where corn yields make records, most fruit and vegetable production has become so sparse that agricultural statisticians no longer bother tracking it.

Just how much horticulture Kansas can get back is an open question. But a half-dozen K-State specialists are optimistic, especially after a 2000 study by the Institute of Policy and Social Research at Kansas University.

The study estimated a potential local market of about $100 million for locally grown fresh or organic produce, meat and dairy in the Kaw River Valley.

Hence, the River Valley Project, a three-year K-State Research and Extension program that began last spring to study the best way to develop fruit and vegetable production in the valley.

The immediate focus is an 11-county region between Junction City and Kansas City that includes Douglas and Jefferson counties.

But K-State extension is a statewide service, and the findings could be used throughout Kansas.

“We’re hoping the local food idea can be implemented statewide including the (Ogalalla) aquifer area in western Kansas,” said Rhonda Janke, project coordinator. “But you got to start somewhere.”

The idea is to promote production of a wide range of fruits and vegetables while focusing on those with the best chance of commercial success given the valley’s particular soils, climate and markets.

The first test crop is sweet potatoes because they grow well in Kansas soil and have longer shelf life than other produce.Initial research shows they have strong promise as a cash crop for local and regional markets and are suitable for growing in some of Kansas’ sandy soil.

In addition, the River Valley Project aims to duplicate an Internet-based trading system in Oklahoma. By the beginning of summer, Janke and K-State horticulture graduate student Pete Garfinkel hope some Kansas farmers will be able to list supplies and prices on the Web so schools or retirement communities or even an individual could click and buy off the Internet.

“It’s kind of like an eBay for vegetables,” Janke said.

What happened

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 1930 and 1964, Kansas grape production fell from almost 9.2 million pounds to just over 307,000 pounds.

In the same period, apple production went from 1.3 million bushels to 342,293 bushels; the more than 255,000 bushels of pears dropped to a meager 8,659 bushels.

In 1930, Kansas farmers had 3,349 acres for strawberries. By 1964, that had dwindled to 133 acres.

Vegetables, which produce high yields per acre, fared no better in the same period. The 225 acres of spinach in 1930 slipped to 17 acres by 1964; asparagus fell from 441 acres to 113.

By the 1980s, fruit and vegetable statistics were no longer even gathered.

Contrast that to corn production, which has doubled in the last 15 years alone, from more than 188 million bushels per year to more than 387 million.

So what happened to horticulture?

With improvements in transportation, processing and especially refrigeration, perishable fruits and vegetables no longer needed an immediate market, according to David Barton, professor of agribusiness management at K-State.

Growers in Florida, Texas, California and Washington could transport their crops and still sell cheaper in Kansas because longer growing seasons, higher yields and migrant work forces helped them hold costs lower than local producers.

In 2005, California grew spinach on 32,000 acres, Texas had 1,300 acres of tomatoes and South Carolina produced 75,000 tons of peaches, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“It’s just that the least-cost supply chain moved from the Kansas River Valley to elsewhere,” Barton said.

But the lack of cheap harvest help is what stymies some Kansas farmers.

Greg Shipe remembers his grandfather’s apple and peach orchards at Sixth Street and Kasold Drive. He now has about 30 acres east of Lawrence where he grows grapes, apples and peaches. He said it can be tough to find labor beyond his two part-time employees. Lifting 50- to 90-pound bins of grapes is physically demanding but pays no better than standing behind a retail counter, said Shipe, co-owner of Davenport Orchards, Vineyards and Winery in Eudora and vice chairman of the 10-member Kansas Grape and Wine Advisory Council.

“Sometimes when we’re picking in the early morning in August,” Shipe said, “we’re hitting 90 degrees – sometimes even over.”

He said it would cost too much to fully mechanize his operation.

Chemicals

Other experts point to additional reasons for the dramatic drop in fruit and vegetable production.

Marvin Pritts, chairman of the Department of Horticulture at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., said 2-4-D, a popular herbicide for broadleaf weeds, did significant damage to fruit crops in the 1940s and ’50s. It was especially devastating to grapes and the wine industry.

“Wheat and fruit growing was kind of in competition,” Pritts said, “and wheat won out.”

2-4-D manufacturers include grape vines on its warning list of plants susceptible to damage from the herbicide, said Jack Dutra of the Industry Task Force in Overland Park, a group that monitors the effectiveness of the herbicide. He noted 2-4-D has been commonly used for the past 60 years. That’s the same period in which commercial horticulture in Kansas went into steep decline.

Another environmental problem helped do in orchards south of Wichita in the late 1960s. Polluted groundwater there destroyed some of the orchards in Haysville, once the self-proclaimed “Peach Capital of the World.”

But perhaps even more devastating to the large peach farms was cultural change. Several of the surviving farms went under as children of the farmers chose other work and the Wichita suburbs sprawled south.

Karen Caine’s family grew peaches on 80 acres near Haysville until 1990 when she shuttered the operation because her children didn’t want to take over the business.

In 1930, the census listed 166,042 farmers of all sorts in Kansas. By 2002, there were 90,392.

Caine, 67, now operates a grocery store with her husband in Haven, northwest of Wichita.

“Everybody’s kind of gone on to other things now,” she said.

A revival?

But K-State’s Warner is optimistic there is a strong potential market for River Valley produce. He said he plans to hire two economists to help determine the best crops and areas in the valley to expand fruit and vegetable production.

He said he thinks Kansas is well-situated as traditional growers on both coasts and Texas sell off their farm land and water rights to the ever-growing cities and suburbs.

And Kansas has a ready population to consume locally grown, fresh produce.

According to Warner, 41 percent of Kansans live near the river valley. And there are 1 million Missourians just across the border.

Potatoes

Southwest Kansas is once again seeing the potato take off as a commercial crop. Enough so that the potato industry asked that the state start keeping statistics again, said Eldon Thiessen, director of Kansas Agricultural Statistics at the Kansas Department of Agriculture.

While current production doesn’t equal the 45,000 acres used to produce sweet and Irish potatoes in 1930, potato-acreage jumped from 3,000 in 2000 to 5,200 acres in 2005.

Potatoes in southwest Kansas have the advantage of growing underground, better withstanding the strong high-plains winds than other vegetables or fruits, said Dean Whitehill, K-State Extension Agriculture Agent in Garden City.

Compared with corn and other grain crops, “it takes a whole different mindset as well as a system to cultivate the planting, the management, the harvesting and the marketing,” of fruits and vegetables, Whitehall said.

It’s developing that system that Lawrence’s Shipe worries about.

Because his apples are perishable after a week or so, he needs a nearby processing plant where he can take them.

But he said there are no plants nearby and for a plant to be built, there must first be sizable production, which is unlikely to happen with no nearby plant.

“That’s the Catch-22,” said Shipe, who’s now focusing more on his winery business than orchards.

Small farms

The goal of the River Valley Project is not to build up large-scale farms rivaling the size of Kansas’ grain farms or beef ranches. Instead, according to Janke, the project will focus on encouraging small farms of a half-acre to 50 acres with hopes of supplying a growing regional market.

To do this, there needs to be a new generation of growers who can also get assistance from university or state-sponsored horticulturists and vitaculturalists, said Shipe, who finds himself and his wife getting too old for the demands of their orchards.

While his two grown daughters aren’t interested in the business, Shipe said he hopes his grandchildren will develop the same enthusiasm he had at their age.

“I thought it was a ball,” he said.