Sitting in his office in Kennewick, about 100 miles from Yakima, Hermann Thoenissen describes his perfect apple with the tenderness he might use to describe an ideal lover. "It has to be crisp," says the area director of apple orchards for AgriNorthwest. "It should be bicolored -- red striped with a yellow background or yellow with a bit of pink. It has to be juicy. I want it sweet, and just under three inches."

The cameo apple comes close to his notion of perfection. He thinks it's no surprise that McDonald's would pluck cameos from its many rivals as an ideal fruit. "It keeps its crispness for a long time if it's kept in the right atmosphere, and it doesn't turn brown easily."

Thoenissen grows about 200 acres of cameos, making him the second-biggest grower of that variety in the state. Given that only 13 years ago no cameos were produced in Washington at all, this is an impressive number. But even then they constitute only 10 percent of his overall apple crop, which is in turn less than 8 percent of AgriNorthwest's entire production, which includes corn, sweet corn and wheat. Cameos still occupy less than 5 percent of the acreage of golden delicious.

McDonald's entrance into the apple sector has made a difference, but it has yet to cause a revolution in the apple industry because growing apples is a time-consuming business. "If I decided to put in some apples today, the grafting and the rootstock would take three years alone," Thoenissen says. "Then it would be another three years until you saw any apples, and five until we were on full production." That makes predicting the future success of Apple Dippers a pitfall-prone business, says Desmond O'Rourke, economist and publisher of World Apple Report. "It would be very risky for any apple producer to change their crop now on the basis of what McDonald's might be doing in six years' time."

But as time goes on, if the demand for apples from McDonald's holds steady, the growers will gladly uproot their golden delicious apples, which are easy to grow but increasingly difficult to sell. Cameos are the opposite, which is why relatively few have been produced until now. "Cameos are prone to the most devastating diseases, like fire blight," says O'Rourke. "You have to keep bending the branches, and then, if left alone, it's the kind of apple that might skip a year. So you have to treat it right."

All of this -- the pesticides, the storage, the waiting, the machinery -- makes apples rather capital intensive. In order to make money, you must first invest heavily, and then be prepared to wait a good while -- in precarious conditions, governed as much by the weather as by inflation or interest rates -- for your return. The larger your business, the easier it is to weather those storms, both figurative and actual. Over the past 25 years farms have grown in size and diminished in number. "In 1980 there were about 4,000 apple growers in the state," says Thoenissen. "Today that number has gone down to around 2,000. And the size of the average farm has increased. The small farms are going to have been having a very difficult time. It's all about access to capital."

Big retail buyers such as Wal-Mart and Safeway have already started this process. Experience in other sectors suggests that, at some stage, the balance of power shifts, and the buyer dictates the terms. Already, retailers demand an apple that is the optimum size to maximize the number that can be displayed within a square foot while remain appealing to the consumer.

The entry into the market of McDonald's, which prides itself on the fact that its meals taste the same wherever you are in the world, will only accelerate this trend toward uniform mass consumption. The bigger a producer, the greater the likelihood that McDonald's will want to do business with it because it will be able to provide everything the chain needs. "It will want large volumes of uniform apples that have to be the same variety and the same size," says O'Rourke. "And it wants to deal with large shippers who can produce those numbers."

Back in the early 19th century, John Chapman, an eccentric loner, roamed the frontier states of Ohio and Indiana, planting apple seeds ahead of forthcoming settlers, so that he could later sell them orchards when they arrived. Johnny Appleseed, as he is now known, ascended into U.S. folklore: an all-American blend of pioneer, entrepreneur and religious fanatic. (Apples were produced then primarily to drink as cider; it was just about a century later that the industry launched its famous slogan, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," helping transform the apple into something primarily eaten, and thereby saving it from Prohibition campaigners.)

Before the 19th century was out, in 1889, a man named Alfred Johnson left his native Sweden and came through Ellis Island to the New World. He made it across the country to Seattle, where the railroad company was offering free trips to Yakima for new settlers. Johnson took the trip over the Cascade Mountains and bought five acres to turn into an orchard.

More than a century later, his great grandson, Eric, is still on-site, tending what is now 65 acres of tree fruits, including peaches, nectarines and cherries, and 10 acres of apples. The farm's motto is "Same Family, Same Location, 100 years." The Johnsons have had the same Mexican family, the Guiterrezes, working for them for three generations. And Johnson sells most of his produce in much the same way that his great-grandfather did. "We pick them, we wash them and most of them we sell right out here, fresh," he says, pointing to his porch. "My grandfather used to say that he wouldn't sell anything he wouldn't eat personally."

But the Johnsons don't grow so many apples anymore. As farming became more industrialized, the margins became too narrow, unless you were producing the kind of volume that would make it worth your while. "I used to grow more apples, but we had to cut back because we couldn't make enough profit," he says. "The big factories can make it on the packing end. But the grower is at the end of the food chain. At some point, there's going to be just 10 producers who are going to swallow everybody else up."

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