Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
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that has maybe six thousand acres of organic production. Crop rotation:
I think that is the dilemma. They are carrot people, and they need that
ground for their carrots. They want a certain volume of carrots. This is
separate from their conventional carrots, which is thousands of acres. In
their organic they may have six thousand acres, but they are really looking
at two thousand acres of carrots they can do and it is a three-year rotation.
They have these other acres they have to figure out what to do with. So they
are trying to get other crops in. I don't think they want too many crops
to make it complicated, but they have to find some other complimentary
crops.”
He explains the farming concerns. “As far as the larger scale, there are a
lot of problems, I think, with trying to grow organics on a large scale. It is
very management intensive. You can cookbook conventional; you can work
out a system. You know what you are going to do at certain times of the
year. If you have a pest problem, you know what you can do for it. You can
manage the fertility quickly if you need to adjust something. Well, organic
is much more difficult. If you get to a certain time of the season and your
plants are running out of steam, there is not a lot you can do quickly, or the
things you can do are very, very costly. I think they are going to find that the
systems aren't in place and they will be vulnerable in certain ways to pest
problems. I don't think it lends itself to organic as it does to conventional,
where you can really manipulate more things.”
This agribusiness presence in organic farming has other impacts, as con-
solidation of processing and distribution hurt smaller farms. Phil worries
that the processors may shove him aside. “In the future are we going to be so
small that people don't want to mess with us? They basically run our garlic
in a day. I don't know that we are going to invest in the specific packing
equipment for garlic, so I don't know what we will do in the future, but I
would like to keep garlic in our rotation as much as we can.”
Phil explains, “Pinnacle is our brand name. We have that labeled on our
boxes. That is the other thing; we are maybe a little different now.We tried to
promote our label early on. We didn't pack under someone else's label. That
is a lot harder to do now because there are not as many people marketing,
and they want you to market as a certain label. So if a grower is growing
for one big label, they are not using their own label. They are packing in an
agribusiness owned box probably.”But Phil is trying to keep his own identity
and remain independent from this system, although “those opportunities
are much more difficult these days. There is a lot more consolidation. Our
future in wholesale, I think we will always have product, but it may only be
five key items that we can do particularly well, like onions. We have always
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