Family orchard is peach perfect

BELLEVILLE, Ill. — At Braeutigam’s Orchard, the company priorities start with a “P.” That includes people, peaches and pumpkins.

“If you have peaches, you can sell other things. People will drive a long way for a peach,” said Tom Range.

Range and his wife, Pat, are the sixth generation to own and operate the family orchard that was started in 1831, when Pat’s ancestors started farming land on and around Turkey Hill, not far from Sugar Creek in what is now St. Clair County.

A lot has changed over the years, including the crop that commands the top spot in sales. And it’s not the crop you might think.

“Peaches are no longer our No. 1 crop, but it’s still an important crop. Last year, it was pumpkins, apples, peaches,” Range said.

The fact that Range now talks as much or more about the farm’s pumpkins as he does the peach and apple crops is significant.

“The pumpkins have become such a popular item. It’s not just a jack-o’-lantern thing. We have a lot of varieties of pumpkins. We have the traditional orange ones that you can carve, but we also have pink pumpkins, white pumpkins, blue pumpkins, red pumpkins. We have tan-colored pumpkins. We have little bitty ones all the way up to giant ones,” Range said.

Fields of pumpkins — 20 acres in all this year — are scattered throughout the farm, planted on an angle to reduce erosion and runoff when it rains.

The addition of pumpkins to the Braeutigam crop lineup is a relatively new one.

“The pumpkins are a recent thing. I’d say just in the last five years pumpkins have come on very strong,” Range said.

When Tom and Pat took over from Pat’s parents, Lester and Marie Braeutigam, in 1980, the farm was 57 acres.

“The primary crop in 1980 was peaches and apples were No. 2. We raised a lot of strawberries at the time. My father-in-law did a little bit of everything, but fruit was his big thing and he was skilled at it,” Range said.

When Tom and Pat took the farm over, they made changes. They added acreage. The farm now has 200 acres in production. They planted corn and soybeans added more vegetable and orchard production.

The one thing that did not change was the name. The farm was started by Pat’s descendants back in 1831, but by way of passing through daughters in the family, the Braeutigam name on the orchard was in its third generation.

“When my wife and I took it over, I said I don’t want to change the name. It’s been that way for three generations. I liked the name. I dated a girl who had that last name. And I married her,” said Range with a smile.

Tom and Pat have been married for 51 years. Tom started working for his future father-in-law seven years before they married.

After they married, Tom made the case to his father-in-law to add more vegetable production to the farm.

“He said if you want to raise vegetables, you can, and I’ll raise fruit. But I worked with him on both side of it because I wanted to know about everything and I am interested in that kind of stuff,” Range said.

His family raised vegetables that they took to St. Louis to sell at the wholesale markets there, so he was familiar with vegetable production.

“I knew about how to grow vegetables and I like doing it,” Range said.

Even with the vegetables, the fruit is what keeps the customers coming back.

“I wouldn’t want to grow without fruit. I would not want to be without peaches,” Range said.

The farm has around 1,100 peach trees and 1,500 apple trees, in orchards that are scattered across the acreage. In the warmer climate and on the higher ridges that mark the area around Turkey Hill, peach trees do well.

“You have to have good air flow. Peach growing is kind of isolated to sites that have mild winters and you have to have good air drainage to keep the frost controlled and to keep disease down, because the moisture slopes off,” Range said.

Peach trees can bear for 15 years, depending on the winters. Apple trees last longer. Some of the Braeutigam Orchard apple trees are nearing 40 years old.

The orchard is open for five months, June through October, and everything is planted, from the trees to the annual vegetable crops, to keep producing throughout that five-month season.

“We want peaches as long as we can have them because they are our summer fruit crop and they sell well,” Range said.

The peaches start to ripen in mid-June and continue through late August.

The same is true of the vegetable crops.

“I wanted this to be a true farm market. We grow it here,” Range said.

The farm raises and sells everything from onions to garlic to potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, zucchini and more.

In addition to the farm store, there’s a bakery on site. Pat’s great grandmother’s house was converted into a bakery. Fruit that is blemished but otherwise fine is turned into pies, turnovers and a farm favorite, butter cake, as well as apple cider donuts. Peach and apple cider slushies also are sold at the farm store and bakery.

All of that production, from field to store to bakery, requires a lot of labor. While the farm has mechanical tools, tractors, cultivators, a mulch layer and transplanters, much of the work, from planting to weeding to harvesting, is done by hand.

“Every peach is picked by hand. Every apple is picked by hand. We try to minimize the use of pesticides. We are not organic and we are not going to try to give that impression, but we minimize the amount of pesticides we use. When you don’t use chemicals, there are alternate ways of controlling pests that usually involve hand work. With the pumpkins, we cultivate and hoe,” Range said.

The farm’s workforce, in full season, is around 50.

“We are fortunate, as far as help, we have a nice pool of local kids. In some years, I get more applications than I can fill,” Range said.

One secret of Range’s labor pool is his experience. Range taught agriculture at Freeburg High School for 28 years, and he uses that experience in overseeing the young people who work for him, including his grandchildren.

Two of Range’s three children, daughter Julie (Covlin) and son Kurt and their families live on the farm. Their other daughter, Sheila, dairy farms with her husband, Doug Lueking, in Clinton County. All of the children and grandchildren help out in some way on the farm.

“Some people say young people don’t work like they used to. No, some young people don’t work. Some young people do. You have to trust them. I’ve got some good help, I really do,” he said.

Staying flexible, in hiring and scheduling and in the day-to-day operations of a farm whose seasons span from peaches to pumpkins, is key.

“You have to do things according to what the priority is and what the weather forecast is. You can’t be in lockstep. We have to work with nature and we have to work with the labor we have available,” Range said.

As far as retirement from the farm work? While Range can see it from the farm on Turkey Hill, he can’t say how close or far away it might be.

“I know it’s on the horizon. I don’t know when it will be. Even when I was teaching, I never thought about retiring, I just changed jobs,” he said.