The Perfect Fruit Page 4
That reengineering of the waterscape, coupled with the great expanse of flat, fertile earth and a climate that is as Mediterranean as anything in the United States gets—with cool winter nights and dry, hot summers—made the San Joaquin an ideal inland outpost for what librarian Kevin Starr called California’s emerging “fruit culture.” The Valley absorbed settlers from all over—post-Confederate Anglo-Saxons, Okies, Swedes, Portuguese, Basques, Armenians, Lebanese, Japa nese. In and around the railroad towns up and down the Valley, all they had to do was ready the land, steer the water, and grow the fruit, and that’s what they did—as Starr noted in his book Inventing the Dream, “the 30 tons [of fruit] of 1869 becoming the 70 tons of 1870, the 1,571 tons of 1880 becoming the 81,976 carloads of 1906.” By the end of the First World War, California—with the San Joaquin as its heart—produced more of just about every fruit and vegetable than every other state combined, a dominance that still holds today.
And yet this fruitfulness was not obvious driving through Bakersfield, one of the fastest-growing cities in modern America. Here, on this late Sunday afternoon, abutting the highway just past the “Welcome to Bakersfield” sign, was all the indication you needed of where the Valley was headed: On the east side, an enormous cement wall blocked the highway’s view into an unfinished housing development; on the west side, the same thing, except a great red balloon hovered above one of the wall’s corners as an invitation to visit (and an unintended advisory). Off the highway, more housing compounds: Cantabria, Lavender Trails, Casa Bella, Mayfaire. Then the predictable Starbucks and Loew’s, and a building so recently conceived that its only identification was “Future Outlet.” From 2000 to 2005, the population in the Valley grew by almost 17 percent, much faster than that of California as a whole. And though things had slowed down recently, as foreclosure rates skyrocketed across the Valley, the state still estimates that the San Joaquin will grow by at least one million people every decade until 2050, which means, barring some hard-to-imagine reversal in patterns, more overburdened schools, more pollution, more asthma, more car thefts, more car thieves, and more reports like this one from the Visalia Times-Delta: “Work crews were still cleaning up Thursday after a five-car train derailed and sent two boxcars full of mozzarella cheese tumbling to their sides six miles northeast of Visalia.” And more morning TV news traffic reports like this one: “We’ve got a traffic advisory of the fruity kind! A big rig that was hauling peaches slammed into the guard rail, and unfortunately, Ryan, there are peaches scattered all over [Route] Ninety-nine. We have a lane closed, and peaches are clear over in the number one lane.”
For years, Valley agriculture has had a reputation more for its quantity than its quality. This, the San Joaquin, is one of the places where people point when they want to talk about what’s wrong with what we eat. While the Midwest handles the corn, this is where the single-crop megafarms pump out the raw ingredients for our industrial food system. With the three highest-producing agricultural counties in the world, this is where Big Ag supplies Big Food. Here’s how big: Tulare County does one billion dollars in milk every year. Kern County’s annual pistachio crop is worth $275 million, which is nothing when compared to its $315 million in carrots and its $450 million in citrus. And from Fresno County, which is home to more than three million turkeys but only one million humans, growers ship $600 million in grapes, $500 million in almonds, $475 million in both tomatoes and poultry, and at least $100 million of a dozen or so other crops, including plums.
On the spectrum of economic and cultural value, the California plum falls somewhere in the neighborhood of insignificant. A fickle, minor crop, the plum is more valuable than relative newcomers to the state, such as the persimmon or the pomegranate, but it’s nothing to more established resident fruits, such as the peach, the grape, and the orange. Still, nine out of every ten plums grown in this country, and practically every pluot, are grown in the San Joaquin, and most of these come from a nook between Visalia and Fresno, with the greatest concentration along the watershed of the Kings River, from the town of Reedley near the Sierran foothills down to the highway towns of Traver and Kingsburg. That’s where I was driving after sundown, on the lookout for a place to stay.
2
DAVID JACKSON’S EXTENDED family radiates across Kingsburg, a town situated right at the border of Fresno and Tulare counties. Kingsburg is so densely populated with Jacksons that some people simply call the town “Jacksonville.” Sun-Maid’s headquarters are here and historically the area around Kingsburg has been a table grape and raisin area. But the oversupply of those crops over the years led to heavy stone fruit plantings as well.
The night before, I’d found a motel in Selma, a town bordering Kingsburg to the north. At various moments in its history, Selma has been called the “Home of the Peach” and the “Raisin Capital of the World.” Today, though, it’s best known for its smorgasbord of shopping centers and chain stores lined up along the highway.
Still on eastern time, I woke early and went out to stretch my legs. In the parking lot, I could barely make out the cars through the low, dense fog, and as I walked through the neighborhood around the motel, the street lights were dim blots above me. Back in my room, I flipped on the local morning news and heard the weather man report that area schools were on a “foggy day” schedule—all buses delayed or canceled. I’d heard about the Valley’s legendary “tule fog.” Named for a type of sedge that once grew all over the wetlands of the Central Valley, the tule fog is a high-inversion fog, a bottoms-up weather event that usually starts after a rain when the wet earth cools the air just above ground level. That air condenses, and because the Valley is boxed in by mountains, the lower store of cool air is pushed down by warmer air on top and has nowhere to go. So it just sits there, like a bored ghost. Several days of near-zero visibility can pass before the fog disperses, and the longest recorded tule fog lasted thirteen days at the beginning of 1954. In 1963, the week after President John F. Kennedy was shot, parts of the Valley were covered for nine days with a gloomy tule fog that never rose above one thousand feet.
The fog is brutal on humans—even a day or two of it can make a person long for the sweltering sun of August—but since it keeps the temperatures in the low-to mid-forties day and night, the tule fog is great for fruit trees, which go dormant in the winter. During dormancy (which is the tree version of hibernation), the trees recover from the long summer and regroup so that their buds can develop normally and grow well in the season ahead. Dormancy is measured in chill hours, one chill hour being one hour below 48 degrees Fahrenheit. Each fruit variety needs a different number of chill hours over the course of the winter and without enough of them, the trees will emerge from their dormancy erratic, like a bear stirred too soon from its cave: The buds might be weak and more susceptible to damage, or the flowers might bloom too slowly or not enough. So what you hope for if you’re a grower (or breeder) of stone fruit is that from December all the way through the end of January, the temperature stays below 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime and below 45 degrees Fahrenheit at night. The tule fog helps make that happen.
By late morning, the fog had risen off the ground and was hanging low in the sky in a solid, gray plate. I drove down to Kingsburg for breakfast and ate a plate of Swedish pancakes at a place right off Highway 99, which runs at an angle along the west side of town. Many of Kingsburg’s earliest settlers were Swedish, and driving around town on my first full day in the Valley, I could see that heritage on display everywhere—a restaurant called the Dala Horse, flags of the Scandinavian cross hanging from street lamps, a windmill at the Shell station. Kings-burg’s Main Street looks like Main Streets all over the San Joaquin, except here all the businesses bid you Välkommen, even the Mexican restaurant.
I met David Jackson at Denny’s. I was surprised when I saw him. On the phone, his voice had been soft, almost gentle; but he turned out to be a striking, built bear of a man, like a hybrid of Cary Grant and Lou Ferrigno. He reminded me of a couple o
f football coaches I’d had, not just because his forearms were the size of my calves, but also because he had a thing for aphorisms.
I’d mentioned my trip to the Zaigers’ and my curiosity about what drove a grower to look for new varieties. “Variety selection is the most important thing we do as farmers,” David said, pointing a spoon at me for emphasis. “If you’ve got a variety that’s not producing or that too many other guys are growing, then you’ve got to find something else. You can’t will that variety to be a success. It’s like the old saying ‘If your horse is dead, dismount.’ ”
The patriarch of the Jackson family was David’s father, Her-shel Jackson. Hershel and his wife, Clara, were born in northeastern Tennessee, where they were married in 1933. They moved to California a couple of years later. They had one daughter and three sons—David’s the youngest—and they both lived into their mid-nineties. By the time they died a couple of years ago (only ten weeks apart), they had eighty-seven descendants spread out over five generations. The Y chromosome is strong in the family’s line; as one grower put it, “Jacksons like to have sons.” All but a handful of the Jacksons live within a dozen miles of the original home ranch in Kingsburg. To a one, the working adults are in agriculture. Together, they control somewhere around fifteen thousand acres of fruit in California. Half of those fifteen thousand acres are controlled by a sales company called Kingsburg Orchards, which is run by David’s older brother George and his sons. Most of the company’s acreage lies within a massive compound southwest of town, just off the Kings River. For the past twenty years, Kingsburg Orchards has flourished by focusing on “specialty” items, including avocados, Asian pears, kiwis, and persimmons. But it’s mostly known as a stone fruit operation, and some of its riskier investments have been into what are typically thought of as high-end novelties—things like black apricots and saucer peaches. Still, if you were playing a word association game with someone in the California fruit business and you said, “Kingsburg Orchards,” the first thing that would come to most people’s minds is the word “pluot.” Kingsburg Orchards started planting Zaiger varieties in the 1980s and the Jacksons were some of the first growers to invest heavily in pluots.
David was an inde pendent grower then who used Kingsburg Orchards to pack and sell his fruit. But after a while he began to feel like just another Jackson. So he finally struck out on his own and started a company called Family Tree Farms. With his sons and his son-in-law, each of whom had his own farm, he bought a packing facility east of Kingsburg in a town called Dinuba. The previous occupant was a company called Apio, which specializes in packaging fresh-cut vegetables. Apio had bought the shed from Cargill, the multinational corporation that had managed to become the world’s largest supplier of grain but—like many other big companies, including Dole and Del Monte—had been waylaid by fresh stone fruit, which was too fickle, too unpredictable, too hard to mechanize. “Cargill lost millions trying to get into stone fruit,” David said. “Plenty of the big guys have tried to get into stone fruit but they’ve failed because they don’t understand it. My dad’s always had a saying: ‘Nothing grows well unless your shadow’s on the soil.’ If you’re not out there getting your boots dirty—checking maturity, deciding when to pick, figuring out how many people you need to do it—then the wheels start falling off. Bad things start to happen. Cargill and all the other large companies who have come out have failed, because they don’t have their shadow on the soil.” He paused and then said, “You know, plums aren’t like carrots.”
A lot of people in California stone fruit had carrots on the brain, because the biggest commercial packing shed, Fruit Patch, had recently sold a chunk of the company to a private equity firm that had brought in a CEO from the carrot industry. Commercial packing sheds are ones that pack and sell fruit for a bunch of different growers, none of whom is large enough to support its own packing house and sales team. Fruit Patch packed and sold fruit for dozens of different growers, and the new Fruit Patch CEO got off to a bad start when he reportedly said that he was “going to do for stone fruit what he [had done] for carrots,” meaning he was going to work the inefficiencies out of the system. The coming season would be his first in stone fruit, and everyone was watching Fruit Patch to see what would happen. The general feeling was something along the lines of David’s assessment: Plums aren’t like carrots, and one man’s inefficiency is another man’s shadow on the soil.
If David’s shadow was the one on the soil at Family Tree, Kingsburg Orchards’ shadow was what hung over the place. When David had first started Family Tree, it had been tough to distinguish himself, but he and his sons and his son-in-law now had close to four thousand acres of stone fruit. That was only half of what Kingsburg Orchards farmed, but still it was no small amount of land to keep your shadow on. Like Kingsburg Orchards, David’s Family Tree Farms grew a lot of pluots and hybrid plums. In fact, the two companies grew a lot of the same fruit and had a similar philosophy about how to sell and market it. In an industry in which durability, color, and size were the main selling points, the Jacksons’ collective war cry was “Flavor!”
“Here’s why I started chasing flavor,” David said, glancing over his shoulder at the booths behind him. “My strongest competitor in the field”—he rarely mentioned Kingsburg Orchards by name—“got an exclusive deal on a black apricot. I started hearing in the woods that if the buyers wanted these black apricots then they were going to have to start buying some other stuff from this competitor, too.” It was flavor and novelty as leverage. “So—you know, I know these guys real well—I went over to them and said, ‘Hey, I want some of that black apricot.’ They said, ‘Are you kidding me, man?’ So I had a decision to make. I could stay in the boxing ring and get pounded, or I could start fighting. I decided to start fighting.”
Over the course of a couple of years, David traveled to the major commercial stone fruit growing areas of the world—Chile, southern Europe, Israel, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand—and he met breeders and sampled fruit. He cut his own exclusive deals on all kinds of stuff—ginger-scented apricots, 28 Brix plums—and when he returned from his walkabout, he was as clear-eyed as he’d ever been. He’d seen the future and it was flavor. No more ho-hum varieties for him. If it didn’t “eat well,” then Family Tree Farms wasn’t going to grow it. While most of the fruit trees were still in federal quarantine, mandatory for all imports, David would get the first round of them out to plant in the coming year.
“I went back to this competitor and I said, ‘Hey, I just want to thank you for not giving me that black apricot. You could have had me right there, but instead you made me five times stronger!’ ” He erupted in a high-pitched peel of a laugh, loud and fast, that filled the room. But then he turned suddenly serious. “But that competition makes us all stronger. Dad always said, ‘It takes two people to make a champion.’ When I wrestled, he said to find the best guy in the room to work out with. Well, I love the competition, but I just want to win. I want to have that flavor bar up to where they have to beat me. So I’m raising the bar to eighteen Brix.” Failure, to paraphrase Truman Capote, was the condiment that now flavored his success.
Unlike Fruit Patch and other commercial sheds, Kingsburg Orchards and Family Tree are vertically integrated companies: The only fruit they pack and sell is their own. According to David, this makes it easier for them to project how much fruit they’ll have in any given season, when it will be coming off, and what the overall quality will be. “If I’m packing sixty different guys’ fruit, then that’s sixty different attitudes I’m dealing with,” David said, still pointing the spoon. “So you’re trying to take sixty different attitudes and put them all in one box. That consistency, that quality is going to vary. And you’re only as good as your last box.”
That mantra was true for everybody, but it was especially important for Family Tree and Kingsburg Orchards, who were always shouting “flavor” from the rooftops. If flavor was your competitive advantage, then that’s what you had to
deliver. Because a variety lasted just a couple of weeks, it was hard to promote and build a market for just one variety of fruit. To help combat this fast turnaround, both Jackson outposts had created premium labels to brand the plums and pluots they sold. Each of their labels would be applied to upward of a dozen varieties during the course of the season, each one cycled in at the moment of its peak ripeness.
The main Kingsburg Orchards label was for a line of mottled red plums and pluots. The brand was called Dinosaur Egg, and the PLU sticker that went on the fruit featured a cheerful apatosaurus (think Fred Flintstone’s work crane). Going head to head with Dinosaur Egg was Family Tree’s label, Flavor Safari, which had seven mascots—a coterie of wild animals, including a rhino, a giraffe, and a gorilla.
While the two lines included many of the same varieties, both companies were aggressively working to replace some of their existing varieties with high-Brix plums over which they had exclusive control. If truly consistent flavor was impossible over the course of a season, then the Jacksons wanted to obviate the need for consistency by growing fruit that had so much flavor that nobody cared if this week’s plums tasted different than last week’s plums. Using a dinosaur and the animals of the African savanna, they hoped to get the fruit buyer to go by brand, yet imagine he was going by flavor.