REEDLEY, Calif. — After two consecutive years of very high volumes, the combined California peach, plum and nectarine crops should be down about 10 million cartons. Grower-shippers said the crops would be more manageable, while the quality, size and flavor will be very good.
“Family Tree Farms is staying the course,” said marketing director Don Goforth. “We were founded on flavor, and that’s our future.”
For Family Tree Farms, staying the course means growing the right varieties and harvesting the fruit when it was meant to be picked, he said. Selecting the right varieties is a complex, scientific task. The company’s 6-acre research and development center near Goshen recently marked its first anniversary.
The center is testing and breeding varieties from as far away as Europe and the Middle East, said Eric Wuhl, Family Tree’s director of research and development.
“Few of the test varieties survive for more testing,” Wuhl said.
Those that do may replace the 20% to 25% of Family Tree orchards replanted or grafted every year.
“There’s no way to luck into success in this business,” Goforth said.
Grower-shippers maintain they were stewards of the land long before there was an environmental movement. Three California growers, Ballantine Produce Co. Inc., Sanger; Fowler Packing Co. Inc., Fowler; and SunWest Fruit Co. Inc., Parlier, are driving home the point by committing acreage to annual audits by Protected Harvest, Soquel, Calif., a nonprofit organization that independently certifies growers’ use of stringent environmental growing and sustainability standards.
“Retailers need to hear about what our growers are doing,” said Steve Ryan, senior vice president of sales for Ballantine. “These farmers should be recognized for their efforts.”
Blair Richardson, president and chief executive officer of Parlier-based FreshSense, the marketing arm for the brands under which the three grower-shippers pack, said 60% of their land has already been certified.
“The annual audits are costly for the growers,” he said, “but there are savings, too.”
In some cases, Blair said, the Protected Harvest-required irrigation water testing discovered sufficient amounts of nitrogen that fertilizer applications could be reduced. Yet another requirement, he said, is for GPS positioning of insect traps. Evaluating the data has at times enabled growers to concentrate pesticides only on those portions of the orchards that are infested.
Fruit from the grower-shippers’ certified farmland is packed under the Zeal label. They also provide pre-conditioned fruit for the Ripe ’N Ready and Tree House Kids labels in addition to their in-house labels.
The industry is changing, and the changes are not limited to environmental and sustainability efforts, said Rick Milton, Ballantine’s director of grower relations.
“We’re seeing a trend toward fruit with better flavor and providing retailers with consistent, fresh supplies,” he said.
The search for better tasting fruit finds Ballantine replanting at least 15% of its stone fruit acreage every year, Milton said.
An old saw holds that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Not true at Kingsburg Orchards, Kingsburg, said Dan Spain, vice president of sales and marketing.
“On average, Kingsburg Orchards introduces 20 new varieties every season, all of them proprietary varieties,” he said. “And every piece of fruit that goes through our packinghouses is grown on Jackson family land by Jackson family farmers.”
Among the new varieties introduced by Kingsburg Orchards this season is the blue velvet, a new aprium variety that joins the red velvet and black velvet varieties in the inventory. Still other varieties bring more color to peaches and nectarines.
“We’ve been testing for more than seven years and are now ready to introduce red-flesh peaches and nectarines to compliment our yellow- and white-flesh varieties,” Spain said. “This is an ever-changing industry and Kingsburg Orchards is among the leaders.”
Changes abound, too, at Dinuba-based Fruit Patch Sales Co. Rick Eastes, who took over as vice president of sales and marketing in December, has established a three-stage quality control program.
“The fruit is inspected on arrival, inspected again on the packing line, and inspected a third time as it’s loaded on trucks,” Eastes said.
Yet another development at Fruit Patch is tree ripe harvesting, a fruit maturity management program that spawned a new label, Juicy Sweet.
“The program compliments our commitment to totes. All stone fruit at Fruit Patch is picked in totes and transported in those totes to the packinghouse,” Eastes said.
The 2009 season reinforces the back-to-the-basics approach for a trio of California grower-shippers.
It was just more than one year ago that The Oppenheimer Group, the 151-year-old Vancouver, British Columbia-based international grower-shipper-marketer, established a stone fruit and table grape operation in the San Joaquin Valley. The California fruit is the summer complement to Oppenheimer’s southern hemisphere winter program.
This year, the company moved to strengthen its California position.
“We now represent three long-time family farming operations,” said Marc Serpa, West Coast grape and stone fruit category manager. “Bujulian Bros. Inc. and Wildwood Packing and Cooling were with us from the start. Now we’ve added Golden Maid, a 61-year-old, Strathmore-based family operation that is heavy into plums.”
Trinity Fruit Sales Co., Fresno, also targeted well-established and respected suppliers.
“We have been focusing on growers who represent second-, third- and fourth-generation family farms,” said John Hein, salesman. “They bring the experience and expertise to deliver the quality and flavor profile standards we demand for our customers.”
Among those customers: Green Giant Fresh, a division of The Sholl Group II Inc., Eden Prairie, Minn. Trinity is now in its third year of supplying stone fruit, pears, kiwifruit and table grapes to Green Giant, Hein said.
When Scattaglia Growers and Shippers LLC, Traver, was formed 18 months ago, it sought more than experience from its growers — it demanded commitment, said Dave Parker, director of marketing. The growers had to be committed to go forward with the best tasting varieties, he said.
“The few growers we selected are constantly evaluating their fruit against newer varieties,” Parker said. “When a new variety is found to be a superior tasting fruit, the growers pull the least desirable of the existing varieties and replace them with the new variety.”
Whether it is back to basics or forward to the future, the California stone fruit industry is never standing still.
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