Dennis - I find myself wondering exactly what the total demand is for pens / bottle stoppers made from apple wood? How is that apple wood going to stack up against all the exotic woods and other materials that are available? Do a lot of people in your area really want apple wood pens?
It would be a shame for you to spend good money to get this apple wood (even if it's free, you have time and expense in going to get the wood and dragging it to your shop) and then find out that even if you price your pens / stoppers so that you are barely making minimum wage that you only sell a handful a year.
You can buy a wide selection of really nice pen / bottle stopper blanks for a couple bucks a piece. You can buy all sorts of exotic lumber and cut it into blanks yourself for less than half the price of buying precut blanks. Starting with the tree, you have to get the wood to your shop, slab it, sticker stack and store, wait for it to dry (or spend a lot of time / money to microwave it), cut to size, sticker stack and store. Your investment in time and equipment to do this should be worth at least half the retail cost of a blank. That would imply that the wood in a pen blank is worth maybe $0.50 and the wood in a bottle stopper blank is worth $1.00.
How many apple wood pens and bottle stoppers will you realistically sell in the next year? How many will the orchard commit to buy? Multiply those numbers by what you figure the wood is worth to you for your use and don't pay more than that.
When I get wood from the local tree trimmers, I will either give them a $20 for a pickup truck load (and they load it in the truck for me) or I will give them some pens / bowls / whatever around the holidays. $20 may seem cheap, but around here they either get $20 to put it in my truck or they load it in their truck and pay to dump it. If I cut it myself (into smaller pieces) and load it myself, no money changes hands.
Ed