Here in southern New Hampshire, there are some apple orchards left, but there used to be many more.
One reason is that young folks in farming families just don’t want to do the hard, dangerous manual labor.
Another is the enchroachment of housing developments and airport expansion that increased land values, especially during the real estate bubbles. Farmers could get lots of money by selling off acreage to developers. So the orchards are smaller than they used to be.
The juice imports from China have been going on for a long time. The small local farmers just can’t compete when you’re talking huge quantities of juice. Most of the orchards that are still open produce seasonal cider, wholesale fresh apples to local supermarkets, and have retail farm stands and pick-your-own businesses.
And the help that farmers use is mainly immigrant labor. That’s not a recent trend. Some orchards up here have been importing workers from the Caribbean and Mexico for 40 years.
A tradition http://www.whitehousefruitfarm.com/
You might think that there would be lots of people wanting to do some farm work with today's high unemployment rates. Not so, largely due to government policies. Every time they extend unemployment benefits, as they did recently to part timers, or extend the time people can collect, there is less incentive to do any work. If a person works at a rate of pay less than their usual, they will collect less unemployment the next time they get laid off...thus lots of jobs "Americans won't do." Thanks government.