 Organic IQF (individually quick-frozen) blueberries provide Sakuma Brothers' highest profit margin. Photo by Robert Hubner.
Shifting a major chunk of his small fruit production to organic
was purely a business decision for Steve Sakuma ’69, head of the
family-owned Sakuma Brothers. The Sakuma Brothers grow a thousand
acres of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, some
other berries, and a few apples just outside of Burlington in
Skagit County. About 15 percent of their acreage is certified
organic. They also run a nursery in California that produces about
100 million strawberry plants a year. Sakuma Brothers is entirely
vertically integrated. In other words, they do their own processing
as well as growing.
Sakuma Brothers employ about 700 people on their Burlington farm
and processing plant and another 750 on their nursery. Even though
Sakuma calls their operation “medium-sized” compared to the
corporate giants in California, it’s a good example of where
organic is headed in the U.S.
In his office one day in June, Sakuma and Greg McKay ’86, the
organic crop manager, and farm manager Jim Riggan bring me up to
date on the business of organic. These guys are no hippies.
“Farming is not for the meek and the mild,” says Sakuma. “It’s
all about capital.
“To us, . . . [organic is] just diversity. You’ve got the
conventional market and the organic market. You don’t want to be
totally in one. You need to be in both. The trick is to find what
that balance really is.”
The Sakumas ventured into organics through a partnership with
Small Planet Foods, formerly Cascadian Farms, the first organic
food processor in the Pacific Northwest.
Cascadian Farms was started in the early 1970s by Gene Kahn, a
former organic farmer in Sedro Wooley who eventually discovered
that he was better at marketing than farming.
“We watched him from a distance,” says Sakuma, “and our
observation was this guy was never going to make it.” McKay and
Riggan laugh. I get the feeling they’ve heard this story before.
Kahn sold Small Planet to General Mills in 2000 for a reported $70
million.
“He was never going to be able to grow organic strawberries in
the state of Washington, just because of the weather. We proved to
be right.
“But he proved to be right that organic was an option out
there.”
Once he’d realized organic’s potential, Kahn tried to persuade
Sakuma to grow berries for him. But the Sakumas were leery.
“We had this conversation with him for a couple of
generations.”
Finally, in 1998, Kahn asked them what it would take to get them
to grow for him.
“Basically, our response was ‘You take all the risk, and we’ll
do the farming,’” says Sakuma. “He said, ‘Okay.’”
Once they’d worked out a custom farm rate plus 20 percent profit
(“If we didn’t harvest a berry, it wasn’t our problem, it was
his”), the Sakumas started growing organic berries.
And what they found out was, “Organic farming, at least in
blueberries, wasn’t as difficult as we thought.”
Still, it requires a different way of thinking.
“We’re still learning,” says Riggan. “It’s harder than just
going out and spraying. With conventional you can let the pressure
build a little bit and get away with it. But organically, you need
to be on top of it season-long.”
Farming today is more than just growing a crop, says Sakuma. All
of successful farming, at least non-commodity farming, is about
being keenly tuned into the market.
“The practices our family might have used 50 years ago won’t
work today. We’re focused on a whole different set of rules. A lot
of those rules right now are driven by the consumer. We’d be fools
not to be able to read that and say, ‘What are they asking
for?’”
Many consumers, however, aren’t all that clear what exactly it
is that they’re asking for. In spite of the dramatic growth,
mention “organic” to the average consumer, even one contemplating
the organic apples at a dollar a pound more than the conventional
ones, and you’re going to get confusion.
In The Gift of Good Land, Wendell Berry refines a
definition that reaches back to the organic movement’s roots,
echoing the sentiments of founder Sir Albert Howard: “An organic
farm, properly speaking, is not one that uses certain methods and
substances and avoids others; it is a farm whose structure is
formed in imitation of the structure of a natural system; it has
the integrity, the independence, and the benign dependence of an
organism.”
Fundamental as Berry’s definition might be, it bears little
relevance to how the designation is used to sell groceries.
Further, some would argue that the current federal organic
standards established by the USDA have little to do with Berry’s
ideals. The organic standards are prescriptive, and increasingly,
any relation to values increasingly is only implied.
In the marketplace, organic has largely come to mean only what
it is not—synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
Recognizing a cash cow, large corporate food companies have
embraced organic production, buying up small organic producers and
applying industrial agricultural techniques to what was formerly a
small-scale, more value-driven way of growing food.
Organic has become big business.
But in spite of a lot of purist hand wringing, adoption of
organic standards by industrial agriculture can hardly be bad. If
organic practices are actually better than conventional practices,
then organic practices on giant corporate farms can only be an
improvement, right?
Well, yes. And no. Questions surrounding organic ag become more
meaningful and interesting when placed within the context addressed
by John Reganold in his Distinguished Faculty Address last
spring—“The Sustainability of Organic Agriculture”—in which he
subjected organic ag to more exacting criteria. Basically, can it
feed a much larger portion of the world?
Not to spoil the story, but yes, says Reganold, it can. And it
will leave the environment, and maybe human health, in a lot better
shape in the process.
A soil scientist, Reganold established himself as someone to
watch in the late 1980s with a study, published in Nature,
that compared two adjacent farms on the Palouse. One farmer had
switched to what are now considered conventional practices,
applying pesticides and fertilizers since 1948. The other farm, at
the time considered organic, had been managed without synthetic
fertilizers and minimal pesticides since it was first plowed in
1909. The organic farm used conservation tillage and a complex crop
rotation. The conventional farm followed a simple two-year
rotation.
“Because of the differences in farming methods,” Reganold and
his collaborators wrote later as part of an article on sustainable
agriculture in Scientific American, “the soil on the
[organic] farm contained significantly more organic matter,
nitrogen and biologically available potassium than that on the
conventional farm. It had a better capacity for storing nutrients,
a higher water content, a larger microorganism population and a
greater polysaccharide content. The soil also had better structure
and tilth and 16 more centimeters of crop-nourishing topsoil.”
But the most significant finding was that even though the yield
per acre on the organic farm was 8 percent lower than on the
conventional farm, it matched the yield average of the area.
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