Glenn Rogers

Growers [and] processors are extremely conscious of how to manage pests with the minimum pesticide inputs. That’s a real focus of everyone, and they’re doing just a tremendous job compared with when my dad started farming in the [19]50s. We know more about the biology of all of our pests, and that gives us the ability to target [and] control them less harshly. So, we learn to be more specific in controlling what it is that we need to control and not damage the rest of the ecosystem.

Growers act very effectively as lobbyists, and they’re getting better at supporting common interests. The corporate farm in Michigan is the cooperative that’s come together - a group of growers that’s come together [and] hired professional management. They still farm independently, but they market cooperatively.

[In general], it’s 80/20: 20% of our growers produce 80% of our commodities. [The] 80/20 rule has been around forever, and it’s more true than it ever was. What used to be a hundred growers may now be fifty, but the 80/20 is still true.

Ours [Birdseye] is a union shop, which is kind of unusual in the fruit business. In Michigan , most of the plants are not union. [But] if you go to the Heinz pickle companies, Gerber, the big name brand people, you’ll see a lot of union shops. The kind of people you run across here [are] mostly a non-union workforce. Our people are local, [and] we don’t use a lot of migrants because of our union capacity. People come and stay. We use a lot of seasonal people, people [who] come back over and over. A lot of [the] line workers are female. [At] our plant, forklift drivers, management – we’ve got females integrated very well. But, in the industry in general, there’s probably a lot of female employees [o]n the production side of things.

Imports [like] apples and asparagus from China , and asparagus from South America , are a huge challenge because of the cheap labor – [In the] last ten years, we[‘ve seen] a huge surge in imports. The things that we have to do for compliance compared with what our government lets us import is frustrating. It’s not a level playing field, and that’s one of the other reasons [besides] labor that people have an advantage outside of this country.