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Ambassador of Fruit
An Iranian pomologist transforms an Idaho landscape and helps its  
growers stay in business

BY ALEC WILKINSON

Published in the July/August 2009 issue of Orion magazine

SEPTEMBER 13, 2006, was Esmaeil Fallahi Day in Idaho. No one told  
Fallahi in order to surprise him. He spent the day digging holes and  
picking grapes and apples on his farm, and then he went to a party  
that he thought was being held for his birthday and was read the  
governor’s proclamation acknowledging his “career-long dedication to  
enhancing fruit crop production.”

Fallahi is a visionary pomologist, a fruit scientist, a species of  
practical rapturist whose reputation in tree fruits and stone fruits  
is international. Since 1989, he has lived in Parma, Idaho, west of  
Boise, where he is a professor in the College of Agricultural and Life  
Sciences at the University of Idaho and director of the university’s  
pomology program—his title is Tree Fruit and Small Fruit Physiologist.  
With the help of his wife, Bahar, he grows novelty fruits on fifty- 
nine acres of sloping land near a drive-in—at night he can see the  
movie from the fields. Under his guidance, farmers in Idaho have begun  
raising fruits that never grew in Idaho before. His ambition is that  
the farms around him will one day resemble the orchard he remembers  
from his grandfather’s ranch in the mountains north of Tehran.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4802/