Sasha the dog diligently patrols the grounds of Montana Fruit Tree Company during an early spring snowfall as owner Luke Ruffner Robinson tends to the pots of budding fruit trees scattered over the yard. The trees are just sticks rising from the soil at this point, but they are bound for a greater glory as part of Luke’s plan to not only provide trees to commercial growers, but also use them to create regenerative agricultural systems across the country that benefit the whole environment. Now in full-swing summer, that vision has come to life.
Montana Fruit Tree Company started as a way to help Luke pay for graduate school at the University of Montana where he was studying systems ecology. At that time, he was simply growing fruit trees for individuals in the community. Soon after finishing school, Luke’s pending projects were abruptly canceled due to COVID.
“I had a lot of inventory on hand so I threw up this website and it ended up growing and growing until last year when we sold like 20,000 trees, mostly out of this little warehouse,” he says, pointing to the Treehaus, the nickname for the onsite cold storage warehouse.
Luke and his team were sending trees across the country. He stopped counting at 35 states last year but he realized he needed to take a step back. It looked like his business was doing great on paper, based on the number of trees being grown, but it didn’t feel great to Luke. “I wanted to focus more on the quality of the individual projects to which these trees were headed,” he says. “I see the trees as the paint, but I didn’t know what the canvas looked like, what the ultimate portrait would look like. I wanted to be responsible in helping create a more regenerative portrait.”
Regenerative agriculture is defined by Luke as an “agricultural practice that enhances ecological processes such as soil formation and the water cycle.” Luke wanted to look beyond simply providing trees to view the whole system. He wanted to see his trees go toward something and he saw an exciting opportunity to do this by helping to design and engineer these regenerative systems for growers.
To do this, Luke now focuses his business on a few key components. One is the plant-breeding component in which he breeds and grows a variety of fruit and nut-bearing trees, vines, and shrubs that are cold climate-adapted, disease-resistant, productive, and that yield tasty crops. These include apple and pecan trees, grape vines, berry shrubs, and some fascinating hybrids like a nectar peachcot, a cross between a nectarine, peach, and apricot. Most of the plants are grown right here in Missoula and Florence. They are dug up when dormant and stored in the Treehaus at 34 degrees and 80 to 90 percent humidity.
Luke has an instinct for breeding cold climate-adapted plants that he is very excited to explore. “I’m of the belief that you can adapt seeds for growing in a cold climate if you freeze them, expose them to the elements in the winter, and don’t protect the roots.” He doesn’t know of any other plant breeders that are exposing seeds to harsh winter weather, and he understands why. “We’ve lost 70 to 90 percent, which is 'good riddance' in my view. If the remaining percentage can survive, I want to keep them around.”
Another key component is the project side of the business through which Luke and his small team help design and engineer systems that go toward realizing their goal of painting a regenerative portrait. “We want to see our trees, especially the ones we are breeding, go toward projects that are regenerative and focus on the entire system,” he says. “We look at climate, then land shape, then water, sometimes roads and fencing, and then the trees.”
Luke gives an example of a recent project that encompasses all these components. “We just got done designing and helping to implement a system on a farm north of Helena,” he says. “It’s about 10 acres and has 35 terraces and there’s not a single pipe in the entire orchard. It’s a completely gravity-fed, pipeless, regenerative, cold climate tree crop system.”
Currently, Luke is in the process of rebranding Montana Fruit Tree Company to better incorporate both the plant breeding and project component. “We’ll likely keep the fruit tree company, but the rebranding will help take that paint and put it on the canvas,” he says. This rebranding is a big step toward Luke realizing his goal of implementing regenerative systems all over the country. “I think we can meet our goals of being able to eat, having a diversity of plants, insects, and birds, having a water system that is putting more back in than taking out, and have it look beautiful.”
“I see the trees as the paint, but I didn’t know what the canvas looked like, what the ultimate portrait would look like. I wanted to be responsible in helping create a more regenerative portrait.” - Luke Robinson