Home Page

Experience Westbank!

• About Us
  
  
• Add Your Company to the Business Showcase
  
  
• Contact Us
  
  
• Table of Contents
  
  

One of the first trucks used by the family to transport the fruit from packing house to the ferry docks at the bottom of Gellatly Road. (photo courtesy M. Reece)

Westbank’s Apples: an Orchard Pioneer’s Perspective

by Deborah Greaves

Some of the Westside’s senior residents can remember a time when apple orchards and other tree fruit businesses dominated the landscape all along Highway 97 - and even on Main Street. Wherever there was a bench or a plateau in the early years of non-native settlement, there was either a ranch or an orchard.

“My dad, Thomas Benjamin Reece, came with my mother from Manitoba to become a partner in the development of Lakeview Heights,” says Milton Reece. “It was set up- completely pre-planned- by a farming syndicate from 1918 to 1920. The area that is now the industrial park where Alpine Helicopters is located was once another 200 farm acres, owned by the Smith family and their associates.”

Main Street Westbank (photo courtesy M. Reece)

Employees take a break for a photo (photo courtesy M. Reece).

After the elder Reece arrived in 1922, he ended up pulling out of the syndicate, as he’d been advised to buy land that was already producing fruit. He looked around for an existing orchard to purchase, and found it on Main Street. He invested $11,000 for an orchard that was already producing fruit, and in 1926 made a second investment in apples in partnership with three returning veterans of the First World War.

“In the early days,” Milton Reece says, “ they planted approximately 48 trees to an acre. Now, it’s common to plant over five hundred trees to an acre.” Trees are smaller, and planted more tightly for maximum yield.

You may have heard the Reece family name associated with fruit packing houses. This is due to the fact that patriarch Thomas Reece was so disgusted by the first bill he received for packing his apple crop that he decided to start packing his own apples, for shipment by train to Calgary.

The packing business in itself kept the family, and many other workers, busy for several decades. As they are to this day, the apples had to be tipped gently from their wooden bins and floated out into water, then bathed. After their soapy bath, the apples were brushed and blow-dried. It was labour-intensive, with people hauling heavy bins filled with apples over uneven dirt floors to load onto “the line”. It wasn’t until 1957 that concrete floors were installed at the Westbank packinghouse, making much of the work easier for approximately twenty employees. The first automated packing line was installed in 1979.

In 1947, the elder Reece sold his business to his three sons, Milton Reece among them. Each son bought an orchard, and Milton still lives today with his wife near an apple orchard – this one owned by his own son.

First packing shed 1930 (drawing by M. Reece)

The packing house on Brown Street as it looked in 1938 (drawing by M. Reece)

The packing house continued to grow (drawing by M. Reece)

These days, however, the two million-dollar automated apple line at the Westbank packinghouse is still, waiting for a buyer who will likely come from another country. Fruit packing facilities are few and far between, with apples shipped from around the Okanagan to central locations such as Kelowna, then scientifically chilled and stored to last for up to a year, so that they may be carefully preserved while waiting to be sold.

Of the multitude of orchards that once graced the valley, just a fraction remains. Even Lakeview Heights, the neighbourhood that was originally established specifically as a farming centre, has few tree fruit orchards. Apples continue to be replaced by crops that Okanagan Valley growers are able to be more competitive with, such as grapes - or buildings.

“There’s no money now in orchards,” Milton Reece says after a lifetime spent in the fruit growing and packing business, “and it doesn’t trouble me personally to buy fruit from another area.”

Reece explains that a young person starting out in the orchard business is faced first with purchasing the land at today’s high prices, then with acquiring the trees. At least ten acres is required. China now has 37 per cent of the world’s production of apples, and the state of Washington in the US out-produces our region many times over. Costs of farming here are high, and growers cannot pay much more than nine dollars an hour for help with picking the fruit. Since most Canadians are unable to make a good living on minimum wage, the fruit industry in the Okanagan was again forced to hire farm workers from Mexico this year, who come on special working visas to help harvest fruit.

“The public needs to be willing to pay for produce to be locally-grown,” Milton says. “If agricultural lands are to be preserved, a way has to be found to make it practical for growers to keep it. It has to be paid for either through general taxes- as you’d finance a community swimming pool- or through private profit.”

Part of the original structure - today it stands empty.

Standing in the historic Westbank packing-house with Milton Reece in an almost empty, cavernous wing of the building that was once a hive of activity is an intriguing experience. As recently as 2004, the huge, low-temperature wing attached to an old but very sturdy building processed four hundred 800-pound bins of apples each day during harvest season. However, the huge “line” machine that used to send thousands of bright apples into a soapy bath and in to consumer-bound boxes no longer moves or makes a sound.

Milton Reece and Deborah Greaves.

The line is quiet now as times change.

Like so many other elements of life on the Westside, the apple business has changed. However, the crunch, healthiness and sweet taste of an apple- no matter where it is grown- remains a perennial treat.