Kim Grabovac

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.

The migrants that we had were small farmers from around Arkansas . That was before cotton picking machines. After the blueberries were finished, they’d go back and harvest cotton. Most of them were just fine people. They even had a preacher [who traveled] with them.

We have about a hundred and fifty migrant pickers that we hire every year. We have fourteen housing units and we house families and groups of people. We have probably two, I think two, really large groups of men that just basically travel around the country following the fruit seasons, and they come out every summer and we house them. We also house some families that have been coming back since we started. So they come from all over, Texas and Florida , and we have a couple [of] families that live in Lawrence , Michigan .

The berries go everywhere. They go out of state and out of the country, too. They go everywhere.