Growers

We had a fruit stand. My grandfather and grandmother lived across the road from us, and grandpa ran the stand. [On] Sundays, you’d get a lot of traffic on US-31, so there was a lot of traffic from Indiana going past. So they sold quite a bit. There would be people, truckers who would come out and buy directly from the farm, too. [In] fact, that was a summertime job. I think mostly as we progressed from snipping strawberry buds, as we got older, then we were tending the stand a great deal. Arlene Emery
We had one of the finest retail wholesale markets here in Benton Harbor . The Benton Harbor Fruit Market was one of the world’s best, which has now gone down to almost nothing. We also had processing plants that would take any fruit you wanted to sell them. At that time, there were a number of truckers [who] would come from the south and buy fruit directly from you. There were just a number of places where you could get rid of your fruit. Now, for instance, buyers [who] wanted your fruit would come and look at your crop on the tree before you even picked it, and they would give you a bid on it. If you could negotiate the settlement, they got the fruit. We gave it to them and they would give us the money. We could get [some] money in advance so we could have the cash to pay our pickers

Now you get no cash. They say, “We will pay you so much when we sell it,” if it’s going to a packing house or something. A lot of growers have not been completely paid for last year’s crop. See, these companies have all the outlets, have gone to large chain stories. There’s no small grocery stores anymore. So most of it go[es] to the large chains. I don’t like to talk against the methods, but large corporations control the entire thing. There’s no negotiating anymore. If they want some fruit from you, they will tell you what they’ll pay for it and if you don’t take that, they don’t take your fruit.

A lot of the old fruit growers are looking to sell their land to realtors for houses. That’s one way to survive. Here in Michigan , we’re losing thousands of acres every year of some of the best farmland. This fruit area is really on its way down. There hasn’t been any money made in fruit growing. outside government farm subsidies.

People in this area made it on their own. They either made it or they [went] broke and went into some other business. There w[ere] no farm subsidies to amount to anything at all until just recently in [the] fruit business. Harold Fox
There’s a small amount of competition but when it comes down to it, we’re all in the same boat. There are smaller farmers and larger farmers, and we all try to do the best to coexist.

We still do the u-pick [blueberries] and…that’s not a big part of the business, but it’s a big part of who we are. People know the Leduc name in the Paw Paw area because we’ve been around for so long. We do a lot of community stuff. The reason we do the u-pick and the retail is for the sense of community and to be a part of the community. Kim Grabovac
I was running around the country talking to women about organizing and having some affect on the farm business. I traveled to every state in the Union . I counted them up one time and figured that I visited Iowa twenty-one times. I told farm women that to survive, they had to organize and be able to gain political clout. In Michigan , we organized a motorcade and went to Lansing to visit the governor and the secretary of agriculture. We complained about the prices of apples which, at that time, were atrocious. We garnered nice results and later formed a national convention entitled “American Agricultural Women.” We elected officers; a president, vice-president, and so on. They offered leadership to the group, and organized discussion groups. We often selected picket places. One time in Bangor we built a makeshift coffin, donned dark clothes, and paraded through town to the processing plant. We emphasized that it would be the grave for all of us if we did not get more money for our product.

It takes a lot of equipment to run a fruit farm today. You cannot survive any other way. Equipment is needed to cultivate, spray, and prune. To haul the fruit, a business requires a packing house that both grades and packs. It can be a rough business.

I always worked with local growers; we had to maintain a working relationship with our grower base. In this business, it is imperative to do so. Wallace and Laura Heuser
We see more and more u-pick farms or farm markets, roadside markets, and those people like a real mix of stuff. You want asparagus so that somebody can come by in the springtime and you can sell them asparagus, and then strawberries. You want a different piece of produce coming in all summer long so that once they start coming, there’s always another reason for them to come back.

The small fruit grower is disappearing. The small farm is disappearing, because the profit margin is so low. So you see smart people getting out of the business. In general, you probably need eight hundred acres in order to generate enough income for you to live in a style that most people would like to live in. What’s happened in agriculture is that the profit margin has shrunk because the amount of money they receive has stayed the same since the [19]60s and [19]70s, but their costs have all doubled. They just can’t produce enough profit to maintain themselves. We[‘ve] had an awful lot of apple orchards in Michigan that people just walked away from and sold them.

There’ll be a great shake-out in the fruit industry, [in] my opinion, where we’ll see the disappearance of the small grower [who] grows for the wholesale trade. You’ll see large growers, large corporate farms, or large family farms that grow for the wholesale trade. The small growers will have to focus on roadside markets, what we call “agritainment,” where the person has something for the whole family to do and keep them on the farm whether it be a haunted house, a corn maze, or pick-your-own apples or blueberries. Something to get that person to come back time after time, and spend money on the farm and stay on the farm.

The average age of my growers is probably between fifty and sixty. As they get to [be] seventy or eighty, they die, and someone sells that farm. In southern Berrien County we have real pressure from Chicago . Mark Longstroth
We obtained another forty acres in about 1908, when my father came over from Germany in 1890 and moved to this area. Previous to that, he married my mother. Then they started growing fruit prior to 1898. A couple of years ago, we had one row of apples that were pushed out, which my mother told me were planted in 1898.

The cost now to plant an orchard - I wouldn’t even guess, because the apple trees, they plant them like we used to plant tomatoes. They plant them that close together, these dwarfs. Theory is it’s easier to get them picked, you don’t need ladders or things like that, but some of these will cost five-six thousand dollars in order to plant an acre of apples. You would have to ride out the bad years and hope for good ones. My father used to say that, “If I have three out of four good years, it’s fine.” If I have two out of four [years], we’re doing fairly well. If it was one out of four [years], we were in trouble and couldn’t make it. I think that kind of holds true now, depending [up]on the commodities that are grown.

Technology tremendously has entered into the processing in the last twenty or thirty years. They have these dwarf trees and some of them won’t get any taller then you are. They plant these, five-six-seven hundred to the acre with a conduit to hold them up. The cost is just phenomenal. If you do not have irrigation, then you better not be in the business because if you do not get enough rain, you won’t get any yield. You could also get the rain at the wrong time. If the blossoms haven’t pollinated, they will fall off and you could get a beating rain. James Lull
Michigan used to have hundreds and hundreds of strawberry growers but it’s now down to just a handful. The supermarkets around here won’t even handle Michigan strawberries at any price because they’re quite perishable.

I see no hope for, peaches and strawberries other than if you can grow your own and sell them locally. That’s why we have the signs up and everything so people will come here to buy strawberries. We do OK in strawberries. But I know that if I plant twenty acres, ten will go to waste because ten acres is all I can sell.

Thousands and thousands of bushels of peaches were just dumped because there was no market for them. And the big supermarkets never stopped using California peaches. It used to be the stores, when Michigan produce would come in, if they were running California produce, they’d stop it. But now they keep California strawberries and peaches while the Michigan season’s on. The worst thing in dealing with these big companies is there are only a few big grocery chains left and they’ve become so powerful that they say to our brokers, “Don’t call us. We’ll call you when we want something. We don’t want to be bothered. We will tell you how much we’re going to pay for it and you’ll either accept it or we’ll go down the street and get it from your neighbor, or if they don’t want to accept it, we’ll get it from a foreign country.” Alan Mandigo
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. Glenn Rogers
We sold at the farm, too; we had a sign out. And, this region is known for fruit and vegetables. Many, many people would come up from Indianapolis , Fort Wayne , South Bend , Chicago , etcetera, and they would just drive through the countryside and see we’d have big signs for peaches, wholesale retail. And, they’d say, “What kind do you have?” and “What do you want?” Over the years, you’d build up a clientele and they would say, “Well, we need two hundred and fifty bushels this day,” and they’d come and get them. So, it was a number of places, but we did sell at the fruit market, especially strawberries. Strawberries [a]re such a quick commodity. Now, in those days [1950s-60s], we didn’t have very much refrigeration. But, today, refrigeration can keep them longer. We sold quickly and got to the Chicago market. Eighteen dollars a ton was what we got at that time.

U-pick is more of a recent phenomenon in the last twenty years. It is a way for farmers to survive. It gives them a little bit more money than they normally see. Some people do a good job, some people don’t. We dealt with the public. There were three or four of us [who] could talk with people and maybe get the gap so to speak. Some farmers just don’t have that, so they’re better off not trying to do it. It does provide a strain on your normal workers.

They call it facing, [and] and the very pretty bunch of peaches that would be facing up, we took that whole thing with the metal hole in it and we’d put in underneath the shoot. They’d fill it up with peaches until it was closed. If you checked the bushel basket - the edge of the lid - and turned it over, and you took that metal lid off and you took the metal sleeve out, you’d have this thing of cardboard and then a very, very pretty bunch of peaches. They’d be all nice and flat, [and that would] be the top of your bushel.

The farmers would share the migrants that they had that week and say, “I need three extra people today, to do something.” It was that kind of a bond, certainly with my dad, where he had something that they needed and he would go and do it. It made sense that four or five farmers would make use of one product as opposed to all five of them buying it that way. He couldn’t afford all that. Richard Schinkel
People are accustomed today to buy them from the grocery store where they are firm, crisp; much like carrots. When they come out to the farm here, they taste a nectarine that was ripened on the tree, and it’s amazing. You need to eat a nectarine in the bathtub with the plug in because it is so juicy.

Most times, we were lucky in making a profit, but during the early [19]50s, we began to see where there was a threat of disturbance in our marketing through labor and through costs and chemicals. All these things had a bearing. The media picked up on certain chemicals and it made a disruption in our income during some times through my lifetime, as well as did labor strikes. So we went into direct sales in 1969 and 1970 for the full year. We’ve been in direct sales, and retail is the primary outlet. It’s actually gone from retail sales to entertainment farming. When people come here from outlying areas like Chicago is a hundred miles from us, they’ll drive in, they’ll want to pet the pony and see the wood lots and wild animals and have a good time, let their kid romp and play, and while they’re here, they’ll buy some fruit. And that’s the thing, it keeps the skids lubricated so we can live one year to the next.

You could’ve bought a farm for the price of one sprayer today. A big farm.

When people go to those markets, they are looking for freshness and personality, and your personality reflects in the flavor of the fruit. If you meet with the people, talk to them, get to know them, trust them, they trust you. Then there is a greater bond in the flavor of the fruit. I’ve often used that example because we raise old varieties of apples. We grow over two hundred different varieties of apples.

We had an apple machine that would pick off the ground; it would pick apples off the ground for juice. It didn’t work because of debris on the ground. You just couldn’t mass-pick up apples. You have to manually separate those that are good quality and poor quality, and so it didn’t work.

People have a lot of confidence in a family farm. They can pick it, and they get it better tasting because it’s tree-ripened. It’s got the natural flavors, not like green unripe fruit. Herb and Liz Teichman
I was born and raised on a grape and vegetable farm in Paw Paw, and have been farming here in Lawton for thirty-some years. My father was one of the pioneers in the vegetable business, particularly asparagus. He was the first commercial grower of asparagus in the state, and my grandfather was the person responsible for domesticating asparagus so that it could be grown commercially…My dad was also a county agent here for many years, back in the [19]40s and 50s. Tim Washburn

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