Harold Fox

• Universities should spend more time on how to handle selling this fruit for profit instead of how to raise more of it.  We already [have] a glut of fruit, but the main thing that universities teach is how to raise more.  That’s going against the grain.  [The] World Trade Agreement had a lot to do with it.  You get fruits coming here from anywhere in the world, and if they can get them cheaper over there than they can get them here, we’re in trouble.

• Our university has been sending experts to these other countries that are now giving us problems.  I know some university professors from Michigan State that went to Asiatic places to tell them how to raise fruit.  China right now has increased.  They are raising ten times more fruit than we are here in the United States .  They’ve got to find some way to get rid of it so they send it back over here in the form of concentrated apple juice at half the price.  They can send juice here at half the price that our companies are making here.  They don’t even want our apples anymore for juice.  Juice apples used to be valuable enough to rely on for our entire picking cost.

• We use to have [grower’s] meetings right in the county.  Most of them [were] young growers, [and] we tried to help each other.  It’s something we don’t have anymore.  Before farm subsidies from the government, people helped each other.  Now, the first thing they do is go to the government and try to get money

• When I first came here, the laborer was mainly southern people  practically all white people.  Then, over the years, they gradually changed.  The black people came in some, and gradually the whites found jobs back at their homes in the south.  We had almost entirely black crews.  Then, later, the Spanish started coming in from Mexico and southern Texas .  At the present time, most of your crews your entirely Spanish.  That has been over the fifty years.  It has changed that much.

• My man went back to Louisiana and got another load [of laborers].  Out of two loads, we did make a full load of help that stayed with [us].  We were picking cherries by hand.  We needed a large crew.  Sometimes we had a hundred people out there picking cherries.

• We had twenty-two houses for [the] help.  Most of those are gone now.  We took care of our help here on our property.  We gave them everything they needed.  Sometimes we would have to take them, if they got hurt, to the hospital.

• If anybody wanted to work, they would come and see these different farmers, and they would usually know the farmers if they had been working on the farm.  They would come and ask them if they needed any help.  One of the big ways to get help was right there.  Anybody in town that wanted to work - all they had to do was go down to [the] market and there was work right there  unloading trucks [and] loading big trucks that w[ere] hauling in and out.  There w[ere] a lot of people that had work there, and they got paid cash.  They would negotiate the rate right there.  If someone really needed a lot [of] help they would offer more money.  If they didn’t need it very bad[ly], the price would go down.  Usually a general price at the time, when I came to this farm after five years in the service, [was] got seventy cents an hour. 

• 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. 

• Bloomingdale [ Michigan ] has a lot of fruit along the lake.  The reason for that is that the lake usually has a lot of ice piled up along the shore in the winter time, and the water is cold.  Your westerly prevailing winds [in] this area [discourage] bugs [from] com[ing] out as quick here.  In the fall, it also keeps this area warmer longer because the water is warmer.  You don’t see fruit growing everywhere, and this is one of the basic areas in the United States .  Right here along the lake.  You have other fruit growing [regions], like in mountainous areas where they get high elevations, but this is one of the most renowned areas for fruit growing in the United States .  I’m kind of sorry to see it go, and I’m afraid its gradually going.

• I’m sorry to say that the fruit industry is going downhill, especially for this area.  They’re going into other types of farming like vegetables, where they were mainly fruit growers.  Tree fruit ha[s] gone to vegetables and they’re doing very well.  But that takes a lot of capital, too.

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