Heritage Orchard Conference

Heritage Orchard Conference

The Heritage Orchard Conference was established in 2019 with an in-person conference held at University of Idaho’s Sandpoint Organic Agriculture Center in the Idaho Panhandle. The conference attracted a diverse group of heritage tree fruit enthusiasts from the Pacific Northwest for a day of presentations ranging from heritage fruit exploration to apple identification. Since 2020 the conference has been organized as a free monthly webinar series (October through April), extending our reach to nearly 2,000 participants from 27 countries. The series has many recorded webinars available for viewing on a wide range of topics related to heritage fruit tree preservation, production and varietal identification.

Join us for the 2025-26 series to hear from new presenters on topics important to heritage fruit tree enthusiasts around the world.

Registration closed

Wednesdays | 10-11:30 a.m. Pacific time

2024-25 presenter and committee members

David Benscoter is a retired federal law enforcement agent. He spent six years as an FBI special agent and 18 years as an IRS criminal investigator. In 2012, he became interested in antique apples when he pruned the 100-year-old orchard of a friend just north of Spokane, Washington. As he tried to identify the apple trees in her orchard, he learned that eastern Washington has a rich but little-known apple growing history. The state of Washington is famous for growing apples, but those orchards are mostly irrigated orchards along the Columbia River and its tributaries in the central part of the state.

Benscoter began researching the history of apple growing in eastern Washington in 2013 and soon learned that apples now considered extinct were grown in eastern Washington and northern Idaho in the early 1900’s. He began searching for extinct or lost apple varieties in Whitman County, Washington. Joanie Cooper and Shaun Shepherd, two gifted apple identification experts who live in Oregon, agreed to evaluate the apples he sent them. Joanie and Shaun are also known for establishing The Temperate Orchard Conservancy, a place where fruit trees in danger of extinction can find safety and be preserved forever. He later partnered with the Whitman County Historical Society and started The Lost Apple Project.

In 2014 his search turned up a formerly extinct apple, the Nero. In 2016, two other once lost apples were rediscovered in Whitman County, the Dickinson and the Arkansas Beauty. In total, The Lost Apple Project and the Temperate Orchard Conservancy have found 23 apple varieties once thought to be extinct. Over 250 apple varieties have been documented as growing at one time in eastern Washington and northern Idaho. They are looking for 39 of those apples as they are today considered lost or extinct. They hope to find these lost varieties and re-introduce them to the public.

EJ Brandt is a retired electronic technician for Washington State University and is also a former Pararescue USAF Special Forces member. Currently living in Troy, Brandt is involved with The Lost Apple Project and Heritage Apple Research. He is responsible for the rediscovery of the Regmalard apple in the Moscow region.

John Bunker is an apple historian, gardener and orchardist. In 1984 he started the cooperative mail-order nursery Fedco Trees. In 2012 he founded the Maine Heritage Orchard in Unity, Maine. His book “Apples and the Art of Detection” recounts his 40 years of tracking down, identifying and preserving rare apples. He lives with Cammy Watts on Superchilly Farm in Palermo, Maine. To contact Bunker or to learn more about his and Cammy’s activities, go to outonalimbapples.com.

Kerik Cox manages a program of tree fruit and berry research, Extension, teaching and administration at Cornell AgriTech. Principal research efforts include practical or field antimicrobial resistance (fungicides and antibiotics), and applied disease management with a focus on apple, stone fruit and strawberries. Extension efforts focus on pesticide education, disease forecasting and applied disease management with emphasis on apples and covered production in small fruit. Teaching efforts include undergraduate and graduate level plant pathology and IPM courses as well as leadership on faculty committees. Since the establishment of his program, Cox has been conducting antimicrobial resistance tracking and field selection studies in New York and the Northeastern United States.

S. Tianna DuPont is a regional Extension specialist and associate professor at the Washington State University College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences. Her program provides opportunities for tree fruit producers and stakeholders to learn and adopt research-based information in the areas of integrated pest management, soil and water management. Her work in the area of soil health includes a recent assessment of soil quality indicators for tree fruit, assessment of alternative controls for apple replant disease and initiation of a Long Term Agro-ecological Research and Extension site for tree fruit soil health.

Josh Fuder has been an agriculture and natural resources agent with the University of Georgia since 2015. His passion and interest is in tree fruits, with much of his experience coming from the hobby world. When he was appointed to his position in Cherokee County, his family purchased a property with 25-30 neglected apple and pear trees. Luckily, he was able to befriend local retired nurseryman Jim Lawson, who had operated Lawson’s Nursery in Cherokee County for 40 plus years before closing in 2002. His friendship with Jim grew his passion for heirloom apples, and he started organizing field days and grafting workshops in the county. In 2018, along with Stephen Mihm of the UGA History Department, Fuder helped established the Georgia Heritage Apple Orchard at UGA’s Blairsville station. They planted their first block of 100 varieties in 2021.

Darlene Hayes is a cider expert, historian and author, allintocider.com, Darlene Hayes is a well-regarded international cider judge and teacher. She is editor of the all things apples, orchards and cider zine Malus (maluszine.com), and writes about cider for a variety of publications. She is currently exploring the history and character of the wide variety of apples that are used in cidermaking.

Todd Little-Siebold is a professor of history at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. He teaches the history of apples as well as many other types of history and has been collaborating with John Bunker and the Maine Heritage Orchard since its inception. He focuses on historical resources that can document which cultivars were grown in Maine and when they were prevalent to help with the process of identification. He also collaborates with the Peace Lab at Washington State University on DNA fingerprinting of historic cultivars in an effort to document the history of the introduction of European cultivars in the Americas.

Rebecca McGee is a research geneticist (aka plant breeder) with the USDA-ARS and an adjunct professor in the departments of Horticulture and Crop and Soil Sciences at Washington State University. Her current research focuses on biofortification and breeding for improved resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses of pulse crops. She is an avid explorer, natural historian and apple enthusiast, and is a volunteer with the Lost Apple Project.

Kyle Nagy is the superintendent and orchard operations manager at the University of Idaho Sandpoint Organic Agriculture Center (SOAC) and co-founder of the Heritage Orchard Conference. SOAC is the university’s only agricultural research station dedicated to sustainable and organic production and research. The orchard at SOAC has 70 varieties of hardy apples, mostly heritage varieties, along with a handful of pear, plum and cherry varieties. He received his bachelor’s in horticulture from the University of Minnesota and his master’s in environmental science at the University of Idaho. Nagy specializes in organic orchard management and regenerative agriculture.  

Cameron Peace is fascinated by fruit, genetics, history and what breeding offers future generations. He is a professor in the Department of Horticulture at Washington State University, and his research program aims to bring the benefits of natural diversity and the genomics age to fruit breeding. He uses new genome-wide DNA profiling techniques to understand the inherited attributes and ancestry of fruit trees. His current passion is reconstructing the family tree of all apple varieties, and the same for cherry. In Pullman, he oversees the student-run Palouse Wild Cider Apple Breeding Program.

Richard Uhlmann is co-founder of the Idaho Chapter of the Lost Apple Project, a founding member of the Historic Fruit Tree Working Group of North America and a University of Idaho Extension Master Gardener. He is a retired gastroenterologist in Boise and was an associate professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Washington.

Gayle Volk is a plant physiologist at the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado, has been performing genetic analyses on apple cultivars and wild species in the USDA National Plant Germplasm System's apple collection located in Geneva, New York. She and her collaborators have used the USDA apple cultivar collection as a reference set to identify the cultivar names of historic apple cultivars in local collections and on public lands.