Inspired by the Remarkable Rise of Two Farm Families

If you haven’t read these recently published American Fruit Grower profile features (“Fruit for Thought: Don’t Look Back; Believe in Growing Forward”; and “Why the Tale of Twin Peaks Orchards Is One of Growing Optimism”), I recommend clicking on the links to do so. The goal of our annual State of the Fruit Industry Report is to instill optimism among readers like yourself while simultaneously addressing the cold hard fact that it’s tough to be a farmer these days. Taking that route without sounding disingenuous can be more difficult than it might seem, but our stance is that we’re all in this together, and together we will prosper, the sooner the better.

If you have read those stories, you know that the main characters — a pair of brothers and a husband-wife team — have accomplished our goal. They went to hell and back in 2025 yet are as positive and confident as ever going into the new growing season. Apple growers Corey and Craig McCleaf, from Lancaster, PA, and peach growers Justin and Camelia Miller, out of northern California, lead by example. If overcoming adversity seems to come easy for them, it’s probably because they have experience on their sides.

Both the McCleafs and Millers took over their farms in 2020. I’m not sure what you were doing during Year 1 of a pandemic and its lockdowns, but I wasn’t trying to get a business off the ground. Unfortunately, the catch-22 of including two cover stories in this issue is that each party only gets half the usual coverage. To even things out and spread a little more motivation, here are some “deeper cuts” on how they succeeded in the face of a lockdown five years before having to overcome the killer freezes and hailstorms of 2025:

Craig McCleaf: “We took over (Cherry Hill Orchards) in May of 2020, right after COVID had started. There’s nothing good about COVID, but it wasn’t bad because we were able to remain open because we had food. That was also our first experience with U-pick. We have 24 acres of cherries. And this farm was well known for pick-your-own. So, it was the first opportunity that people could get out outside, out of their houses, without wearing masks because you’re out in the open, you’re not around too many people. We opened up on a Saturday, which we later realized you never do, and we estimate that that first Saturday we were open we had about 4,000 people in the orchard, and it took over 2 hours to get out of the orchard because we were weighing everything. We rapidly changed the way we were doing things, but it was overwhelming. Big time.”

Corey McCleaf: “We had no idea what direction to go. We were still open at the time, but we didn’t know whether they were going to shut us down or what. We didn’t know what to do, but it wound up being a great year to start.”

As for the Millers, 2020 not only brought COVID and its limitations but also an electrical fire that destroyed the 100-year-old packing shed at Twin Peaks Orchards, which, at that time, was still owned by Camelia’s parents.

Justin Miller: “The fire in 2020 could have been a lot worse, but it’s pretty devastating when you don’t even have a screwdriver the next day, and you’ve got fruit to pick. Everybody was kind of shell-shocked, so we just kind of took over at that point. After the fire, my mother- and father-in-law, in their late 70s, we bought them out, and we basically paid for the name and some old trees because they were kind of struggling on their own, and we had an operation across the road. We merged and rebuilt this thing in September 2020. And we’ve been rebuilding it since. We’ve gone from $450,000 in sales that first year to over a million dollars in sales last year. So, we’ve grown every year, we’ve built our brand up every year, and that’s really to the leadership of Camelia and (Farm Manager) Valentin (Enriquez). We just figured it out as a team, and we’re lucky that we had a really good team of people that wanted to work with us, and that’s kind of where we’re at now.”

Agriculture brings with it a lot of adversity these days. It always has. But hard times don’t define our outcomes. Instead, they can be turned into opportunity. The McCleafs and Millers are proof of that.