The young farmer walked slowly over bruised and rotting apples, a little like walking on egg shells, but more costly.
Greg Ardiel stood in his empty field, not even a stump remained to prove it was a flourishing orchard a few days ago.
An F-2 tornado followed a path through the heart of Beaver Valley stretching from 600 to 900 feet wide, consuming the oldest and youngest trees in the area and throwing the crops from the nurtured branches. This year's dream crop destroyed in seconds.
Ardiel is a fourth generation apple farmer. He bought his own orchard in February this year.
He spent tens of thousands of dollars renovating two outbuildings on the property to have them ready for storage and rental space - they've been reduced to concrete slabs. The debris is scattered kilometers away in neighbouring orchards.
The trees left standing on the 27-acre farm are empty. The apples scattered everywhere would have been ready for harvest - Ardiel's first harvest - in three or four weeks. Now, the sugar content is too low and they can't even be gathered for juice. They might have been salvageable two weeks from now, but the fruit was punctured, imbedded with rocks, impaled on wooden stakes and broken branches. The fruit is severely bruised and rotting too fast. Mold has started to set in, and one moldy apple ruins the whole barrel.
A dozen acres of trees were uprooted, in some cases taken away, disappeared as if to the land of Oz.
Ardiel's mom is there to help pick up debris, cook dinner, remind her son to eat.
"A farmer works with nature ... they learn to ride the storms, they're known to be ameliorating," she said. "But that doesn't make it easier ... you don't expect this your first year."
The tornado took a merciless path through Robert and Lynda Taylor's orchards.
Lynda drives the Gator through the trees. She picks up roof trusses, assumingly from a neighbours house and wire mesh that was used to protect young trees from mice, anything she can do to help.
The Taylor's still aren't sure how much they've lost. No grower is. There's no way to know what's happened to the root system of the trees left standing. Entire blocks of trees have to be removed if they haven't already been consumed by the tornado. Spot planting doesn't work on an orchard. What acres the tornado destroyed will be multiplied exponentially when it comes time to replant.
Lynda says her husband can't sleep. He spent the first couple days with a fever. So everyday, the couple works for as long as there's light. Trying to accomplish something.
"Farmers - it's engraved in them to be optimistic," she said. "I think that's what carries us."
John Hewgill had one of the few standard orchards left in the area. The 50 year-old trees on his farm were highly productive - almost defying odds in competition with higher density orchards more commonly grown today. He could get 700 to 1,000 bushels per acre.
"It was a beautiful crop," he said. "The crop you wait for your whole life."
The crop now litters the ground at the orchard surrounded by uprooted trees - roots that reached three feet down and at least 10 feet out.
Hewgill said if he wanted to remove a tree like that, he couldn't. It's like trying to move a cement wall.
The crop loss and damage to trees follows a path 1,000 feet wide; the most severe impact is in the middle 600 feet.
"The force was astronomical," said Shane Ardiel, local grower and president of the Georgian Bay Fruit Growers Association.
Tap roots six inches in diameter were snapped as if made of Styrofoam - something the veteran growers have never seen.
The mangled trees juggled in the tornado and dropped all over the fields will have to be replaced. Apple trees are custom orders. The rootstock usually comes from Holland a year after an order is placed. Then a special nursery grafts in a portion of the variety that the farmer needs and must spend a year growing it.
The farmer gets the yearling two years after it is ordered. The tree itself costs about $9. Then there's the cost of wire mesh around the base, a steak or wire system for support, sprays, irrigation machine equipment, labour and time. It takes three to five years after the tree is planted for it to be productive. Seven years from order date before a tree starts to pay for itself. In that time, the farmer pours money into the crop. Tending to it. Pruning it. Nursing it. So that, in time, there is a return on investment.
Local growers say it costs $20,000 to plant one acre of apple orchard in the first year.
There was over 100 acres ripped up by the tornado and hundreds more in crop damage and unknown damage.
There is crop insurance and the federal government has developed a program for tree insurance. However, both systems are flawed.
Gilroy explains that tree insurance does not apply to first year farmers, even if the trees have been yielding fruit for years, a first year farmer does not qualify, and therefore gets nothing. If a farmer does qualify for the tree insurance plan, they will receive $18 per tree. An insult, says Greg Ardiel.
Crop insurance in general is expensive and complicated, said Gilroy. Because it is based on production levels, it is not loss recovery. Whatever crop is harvested is counted against crop lost. For example, if a farmer loses half an orchard, but the other half of the orchard produces enough to amount to 80 per cent of the average insured production, a farmer will get nothing.
The consensus in the wake of this destruction is that a new system is needed for special cases like this - loss that stretches six, seven, even ten years.
The farmers need help.
The magic number, says Shane Ardiel of the GBFGA, is $6 million.
The town is applying for funding through the Ontario Disaster Relief Assistance Program, which has the province match every dollar raised with $2 of its own funds. However, that makes the community responsible for raising $2 million - immediately.
Mayor Ellen Anderson along with the rest of council have been touring the affected areas and meeting with growers. Federal MP Helena Guergis and Provincial MPP Jim Wilson have also toured the orchards.
If aid isn't given soon or at all, farmers will have to find a way to rebuild and a way to stay in business. But none of them expect to be able to return to the same levels of production they saw before the tornado.
Replanting is done acre by acre. Never 20 acres at a time.
Greg Ardiel doesn't know what will happen without aid. He's young and doesn't have the same assets to fall back on. But he's got time to rebuild, if he can survive this blow.
The Taylors are focused on just cleaning up and salvaging what crop remained on the branches.
Nobody wants to think about being left without aid.
John Ardiel, a local veteran apple grower said there's already a shortfall in assistance for farmers, especially young farmers. He believes the government should step in with funding to help the entire community.
"If Ontarians want local produce, then the government should step in," he said.
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