The University of Idaho’s Heritage Orchard Conference will be transformed into a nine-month online webinar this year.

The conference begins at 10 a.m. Aug. 19.

Last year was the first conference. A two-day conference had been slated for this fall.

“We were hoping to make that an annual, in-person event, then COVID happened, so we had to do some rethinking,” said Kyle Nagy, manager of the university’s organic agriculture center in Sandpoint.

The webinar series allows an audience to watch presentations at their convenience, he said.

Roughly 190 people have registered for the conference so far, including residents of Canada and New Zealand.

Heritage apples have grown in popularity during the last decade, driven by the popularity of hard cider in the U.S.

“To make a really good hard cider, you need to have a good mix of varieties,” Nagy said. “A lot of growers are just growing dessert apples, which don’t particularly lend themselves to hard cider production.”

The popularity is also driven by more home gardening and home orchards. Nagy estimates that heritage apples make up 1% to 5% of the total apple market.

“People start hearing about these interesting old varieties that may not be available on the shelves at the grocery store, but there’s a lot of good attributes to these trees,” he said.

The conference series kicks off with “Sleuthing for Lost Apples: Lessons from the Experts.” Experts include Spokane-based David Benscoter of the Lost Apple Project and John Bunker of the Maine Heritage Orchard.

Most conference topics are specific to apples, but the agenda includes orchard conservation and fruiting plants from the Gold Rush era, Nagy said.

The center raises 6,000 to 7,000 pounds of 68 varieties of apples, pears, raspberries, apricots, plums and cherries.

The Sandpoint orchard represents just a sample of the 15,000 named apple varieties known from historical records in North America. Some 3,000 varieties are grown today, according to the university.

Future in-person conference presentations may be recorded or streamed online for a broader audience, Nagy said.

https://www.uidaho.edu/cals/sandpoint-organic-agriculture-center/conference