Apple shortage changes where Johnny Appleseed Festival booths get apples

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) - This summer's drought forced booths at this year's Johnny Appleseed Festival to look in other places for apples.  Some vendors who usually provide booths with apples each year had to skip the festival due to an apple shortage.  The shortage doubled the price of apples.

"If there's no apples, there's no festival," David Neel, who attended the festival for the first time last year, said Saturday.  "That's what it's all about."

Bruce Hayes, the festival's director of administration, said the drought took a big toll on area apple orchards.

"Many of our apple crop this year," Hayes said.  "It wasn't just a matter of not having apples to bring to Johnny Appleseed Festival for us, we had people who had generations on the farms who could not remember a time where they didn't even have apples for their own family.  We had people this year who had absolutely zero apples."

Hayes said the festival's director of food market went further to look for apples.  The groups that run the booths ended up getting them from as far away as 150 miles.

"Usually we get out apples out of Angola," Brian Meyer, who helps with Boy Scout Troop 419 out of Fort Wayne, said.  "This year we had to go to Rochester Hills, Mich. to get cider, and had to go to Berrien Springs, Mich. to get apples."

Meyer and the boy scout troop sell apple cider, and demonstrate how to press apples.

"It's Johnny Appleseed Festival, we have to have apples," he said.  "We have to have cider.  It's what we do."

Meyer added the festival is the troop's biggest fundraiser of the year.  Most years, they'll buy 100 bushels of apples, but only bought 90 this year.

Caitlin Gunkel helps with Venture Crew 2625, a co-ed boy scout organization that sells caramel apples at the festival.  She said her group was fortunate that the vendor her and her family works with was still able to get them apples.

"We've actually used the same vendor over a decade now," Gunkel said.  "He knows that we're going to come to him, so he's able to provide the same amount to us as he did last year."

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