The Perfect Fruit Read online

  The Zaigers were poor, but they were better off than they’d been in Iowa, and it was Floyd’s job to take fifty cents into town every week and buy a hog’s head. The family didn’t own a car, and town was five miles if you went along the road, three if you went across the pastures. The butcher would put just one wire through the hog’s snout, with no wrapping around the head. Floyd had to hoist it up with the wire, which always cut into his hands. But if he got the head dirty on the way home, there was trouble from his father. So to keep the head clean, he mapped out every tree stump across the pastures so that he could safely set the hog’s head down to rest his hands. He’d get the head home—clean—and they’d split it and eat the brains, then have head cheese sandwiches for school. That was the routine.

  Floyd’s three older brothers all went to war. Of them, only one returned unscathed; Roy was killed in Italy, and Doliver was shot up and sent to recuperate at a hospital in Modesto, where Floyd’s mother soon moved to look after him. Floyd was drafted late in the war and sent to San Luis Obispo for basic training. When he had leave time, he’d hitchhike up to Modesto to visit his brother and mother. By the time Floyd got shipped off to Japan, the war had wound down. He got out of the ser vice a few months later and because he had nothing to keep him in Oregon, he moved to Modesto, too. He heard that a neighbor with a small carpentry business was looking for another set of hands. The neighbor couldn’t go to the union; if you went to the union, the man said, you’d end up with somebody who only did roofs, or only did siding. “I need somebody who can do roofs, who can do siding, who can dig ditches if that’s what we need to do.” He offered Floyd $1.25 an hour, which was good money then. The union found out about it, though, after Floyd’s first day, and so he didn’t work a second one. The only other job Floyd could find was shoveling chicken manure at Foster Farms (which has since grown to become one of the largest poultry producers in the United States). At the time, Floyd drove an old Ford that wouldn’t start unless you pushed it. It was light enough to push pretty easily, though, so when he needed gas, he’d dip half a block off the main road and roll over to the Dave Wilson Nursery.

  The nursery was in the plant business, of course, but in order to justify the expense of having someone sit in the front office all day, they’d installed one gas pump out front so that whoever was working would have something to keep him busy during the lulls. Floyd would stop in for gas and chat with whoever was working the pump. That person was often John Wynne, who was the young son-in-law of Dave Wilson, the founder of the nursery. Wynne had just finished school and was close to taking over the nursery business. He and Floyd shared a love of fishing and hunting, and they became good friends.

  School was something Floyd had been thinking about himself. In 1947, he gave notice at the chicken farm and started taking classes at the junior college in Modesto. A semester later, wanting to study plant physiology, he transferred to the University of California, Davis, which had been set up in 1905 as the farming outpost for the University of California system. (Until 1959, Davis wasn’t formally recognized as an official campus and instead was called the “University Farm.”) During Floyd’s sophomore year at Davis, he met Betty, who was working as a bookkeeper at Woolworth’s. They made plans to get married at the beginning of Floyd’s junior year. That summer, they didn’t see much of each other, though, because Floyd and his brother had applied for and been awarded a government contract to work up in the Sierra Nevadas clearing wild currants and gooseberries, which had been identified as hosts for a tree-killing fungus called white pine blister rust. Floyd and his brother would pack a mule with supplies for a week, go up there and do the clearing work, then come back down to Modesto to resupply for another week or so. They camped in a tent alongside a creek and before they came out of the woods each time, they’d catch a bunch of trout to take to their mother. It was a good job, because up there in the woods, there was nowhere to spend the money they were earning. The bad thing about it was that, as government contract work, it took forever to get paid. So Floyd came out of the woods a broke groom. But Betty had eighty dollars that she had saved from her job, enough for their first month’s rent in Davis, where they lived out in a trailer amid the ducks and chicken pens that belonged to the landlord.

  After finishing at Davis, Floyd was supposed to go to work at Shell, but the company suddenly cut back; the guy who had assured Floyd a job called and said, “Hey, even I’ve got to move back to Illinois.” Floyd found a job teaching classes at the community college in Modesto. He and Betty rented a house in town next to Muni 9, the city golf course. But having lived on a farm for most of his life, Floyd felt anxious being crammed in there among his neighbors, hearing their conversations at night through the walls. After a year or so, he and Betty looked around for something they could afford. Eventually, they found a crumbling two-and-a-half acre plant nursery on the outskirts of town. It had been bought to sell off inventory, and the windows and doors of the small home and greenhouses were kicked out, weeds growing out the tops of the roofs, which were on the verge of collapse anyway. Instead of tearing the greenhouses down, they decided to fix them up. They jacked up the greenhouses, put in new windows, and repainted the place. Floyd was teaching full-time, but since he had the green houses, he decided to put his degree to good use. In his spare time, he started dabbling with azaleas and rhododendrons, trying to breed more heat resistance so that the plants could endure the hot Modesto summers. It was 1953. Floyd was twenty-seven.

  With every cross they made, they’d get anywhere from fifty to one hundred seeds, most of which would grow into viable plants. Because the azaleas were purely ornamental and because they were growing the plants to sell directly (as opposed to selling seed to growers), they didn’t have to worry about many of the issues that would later plague them as fruit breeders. If a seedling’s flowers were pink, they’d call it a “pink” azalea. If the flowers were red, it was a “red” azalea. At that point, just about everything they grew was as good as anything else on the market, so they could try to sell their inventory even as they were still selecting for exceptional stuff to use in their nascent breeding program.

  One day, an old classmate of Floyd’s stopped by with his boss to take a look around. The boss’s name was Fred Anderson and he was a mid-career fruit breeder who would eventually become known as the Father of the Modern Nectarine. Before going out on his own, Anderson had apprenticed with the most famous of plant breeders, Luther Burbank. And now, at Zaiger’s, Anderson liked what he saw. Azaleas, nectarines, labradoodles: It didn’t matter what you were breeding, only that you had the touch. And Floyd seemed to have the touch. Anderson offered Floyd a job as his second breeder, and Floyd took it; he quit his teaching job, hired a couple to move in and look after the azaleas and rhododendrons, and packed up his young family to move them the sixty miles south to Le Grand. He was given the responsibility with the other breeder of walking through the orchards to determine which of the selections were worth keeping around. Each of them was on his own in making all the selections, and there was very little in the way of training. Anderson had been running his own operation for more than twenty years, so there was plenty of fruit to choose from. They got started very early in the morning, and when Anderson came to the field at half past nine each morning, Floyd and the other breeder handed over their lists of selections that had looked good enough for Anderson to review himself. At the time, Floyd felt like he was being given too much responsibility. His only real experience was with azaleas, and most of the gene tics work he’d done in college had to do with dairy cows. What did he know about fruit? What was he supposed to be looking for? What if he missed something? Sometimes, it seemed like Anderson himself didn’t know what he was looking for. One day, he’d stop in front of one of the trees Floyd had selected, look it over, and say, “I don’t know what you see in that.” Then, the next day, he’d stop at the same variety, wonder why it wasn’t on the list, and say, “Man, that is beautiful!”

  “I di
dn’t always appreciate it at the time,” Floyd said one morning, as we were walking around checking blossoms, “but looking back, I realize that it couldn’t have been any better. It was such a golden opportunity to work for Fred. When he started, there wasn’t a carload of nectarines shipped out of California. And by the time he died, there were more nectarines being shipped than peaches.”

  Most of what Floyd worked on did involve nectarines, but Anderson also kept hounding him to start a hybridizing project with figs. “To his knowledge nobody had ever done anything with figs, and he kept saying to me, ‘Man, you’ll be the first, so everything you do will look great!’ ” (Anderson may have been on to something. One of the discipline’s classic texts is Jules Janick and James Moore’s multivolume Fruit Breeding. The chapter on figs they included in their original edition was dropped for the 1996 edition because nothing worth noting had happened in the field for so long.) Nectarines intrigued Floyd, but he was unenthused by figs. And after a season in Le Grand, Floyd was beginning to feel a little bit like a third wheel. The other breeder there had been working with Anderson for years and they behaved like an old married couple, always bickering about something or another.

  Meanwhile, things were not going well back in Modesto. Floyd wasn’t happy with the family that was looking after the place. When he could, he’d go back on the weekends to check on things. One weekend, he stopped to pick up the mail and noticed an electric bill in the family’s name that had a different address on it. Floyd went to investigate and saw that the family had a second place where they stashed the plants they were stealing from the Zaiger green houses. Realizing he couldn’t keep both jobs going, Floyd left Anderson at the end of the season and moved the family back to Modesto. Floyd remembers the day they returned. He was driving the family in an old car, with all their belongings stuffed into the cattle stalls of a trailer he was pulling. There was a train that ran down the middle of Highway 99 then, and he kept pace with the train, stopping at all the same traffic lights.

  “The conductor kept looking down at us. And finally we were stopped at one light, and he looked down at me and he yelled, ‘Howdy sharecropper! When’d you get in?’ ”

  Back in Modesto, the Zaigers took to the plant nursery business full time. For the first several months, it seemed to rain every day. There were no customers and there was no money. Things got so bad that Floyd and Betty started taking plants to chain stores like Safeway and to gas stations along the highway. They’d grow the plants in one-gallon cans, stick them in the greenhouse to bring them into bloom, then pull colored foil over the cans to make them look nice. The idea was to put them in the stores and get some impulse buys. They sold each plant to the stores for forty-five cents, and they guaranteed the sale, provided the store didn’t sell the plants for more than ninety-nine cents a can. They tried to put them as close as possible to the bread stand, on the theory that people still had to buy bread, rain or no rain.

  The first couple of stores they got into sold every single plant, and soon they were delivering plants all over northern California. A few days a week, Betty would take the delivery truck to Fresno and Sacramento with the two youngest children, Leith and Grant, in tow. On the other days, Floyd made the San Francisco runs. It rained so much that some of the underpasses flooded, and the highway authorities had to plank out in the field around the underpasses to keep the highways open.

  Some stores weren’t immediately receptive to the plants. Floyd remembered going to see the manager of one local grocery. “He said, ‘Azaleas? Azaleas? What the hell are azaleas?’ I said, ‘Come out and let me show you.’ I brought him out and raised the curtain on the truck and some ladies walked by and said, ‘What do you want for those?’ I said, ‘Ninety-nine cents.’ And boy, they started grabbing them and he gave me an order right then.” As they branched out to more and more stores, they ran into the same pattern: It was hard to get in to see a manager, much less convince him to buy anything. But once you could show him some sales, he was glad to see you. The bottom line was that you had to make the buyers some money. That was true in azaleas, and it would be true in stone fruit.

  Even as the Zaigers spent all their daylight hours tending to the ornamental nursery business, Floyd was having a hard time forgetting about fruit. During his two seasons with Fred Anderson, Floyd often says, he had been “bitten by the dreaded disease of fruit breeding.” From his experiences with Anderson, with whom he would stay friends until Anderson’s death, Floyd knew that fruit breeding was an old man’s game whose progress was best measured on a long clock. It was a trade best not dabbled in, something you had to treat like a calling. Stone fruit required years of work before you could even tell if a variety had real potential. A few years would go by as a breeder made selections from his crosses. And then another few would go by as he evaluated the selections. With luck he’d have something worth patenting and releasing as a variety right off the bat, but several more years would pass before any growers would see fruit from the variety. In most cases, once a variety really took hold among growers and the royalties started coming in, the breeder would already be two-thirds through the period of patent protection. “Disease” is the best word to describe what causes someone to become a private fruit breeder. No well person would pursue it unless it was on somebody else’s dime.

  Knowing that he had a long road ahead of him, Floyd was eager to get his own fruit breeding operation going as early as possible. Whenever anyone asks how he started, he tells a little story, always pacing it like a “man-walks-into-a-bar” joke: “Well, I went in to my wife,” he’ll say as the setup, “and I said, ‘Betty, this breeding is going to be a long-range project.’ She said okay. ‘I think it will take twelve to fifteen years for the first income to come back.’ She said okay.” There’s always a pause here, as his face opens into a wide smile—it’s a short joke. “And then I was pretty close. Twelve years later, I brought her a check for two hundred fifty dollars.” This last bit comes across as the punch line, but it also happens to be roughly true.

  2

  ACROSS THE STREET from the Dinuba headquarters of Family Tree Farms, a golf community called Ridge Creek was in the works. According to the brochure, the development would have four hundred new homes built in “three separate golf course neighborhoods.” The course itself would have the longest par five in California (653 yards) and the largest driving range west of the Rockies. For now, it was just a flat expanse of dirt. I could see bulldozers working trenches in the distance.

  The parking spot closest to the front doors at Family Tree is reserved for the “Best Grower.” The privilege of parking there rotates among David Jackson, his two sons Rick and Daniel, and his son-in-law Andy Muxlow. (It’s generally first come, first served.) Each of them owns his own ranch, and collectively they feed into the packing facility and sales company that is Family Tree Farms. While David is Family Tree’s main strategist and figurehead who seeks out new fruits and evangelizes on behalf of flavor, Rick spends most of his time in the orchard, Andy oversees the marketing department, and Daniel runs the packing shed.

  It was Daniel who joined his dad to meet me. By way of introduction, David said, “At the end of every season we say that things could be better next year. Well, this is the official beginning of next year.”

  It’s often said that if you’ve seen one packing shed, you’ve seen them all. And while it’s true that the underlying order is the same from shed to shed—fruit comes in, gets sorted and put in a box, and then goes out—it’s also true that packing sheds are defined by their little differences. Think, if you can bear it, of two separate floors in a big office building and how one sea of cubicles can seem entirely different from another because of the height, orientation, and texture of the dividers, the color of the walls, the lighting in the rooms, and the ring tones of the phone system. Packing sheds are distinct in that same way. While they’re all essentially big hangars filled with similar component parts, each hangar feels different. One cavernous packing
shed I visited was tinted in a dusky orange glow that somehow fit the mood of the overall company. Another was so tight—the space managed so efficiently—that it felt like a submarine control room. The main floor of the Family Tree shed was bright and airy. Two open bays in the north and east walls let in plenty of light and the scale of the shed was well proportioned for the machinery that filled it. It wasn’t so large that you felt tiny inside it; nor was it so snug that you felt trapped.

  The shed was still empty at this time of year. In order to keep the machines running and the revenue coming in year-round, many packers run contraseasonal crops—mostly citrus—in the winter. Family Tree, though, is a pure summer-fruit operation, so the shed was still in mothballs.

  We walked around to the open bay on the shed’s north side, where most of the fruit comes in on flatbed trucks from the orchards. Instead of the industry standard bin packing, in which fruit is picked into individual totes and then dumped by the pickers into a big hamper, Family Tree picks its fruit into shallow, stackable pallets. Because of the fragility of stone fruit, there are very few things growers and packers can do to mechanize their way to greater efficiency. Just as you can’t shake a plum off the tree like a walnut, you can’t run a plum through a packing shed like a carrot, virtually untouched by human hands. Still, you could make small improvements here and there, and one such piece of equipment the Jacksons had invested in was a pallet flipper that quickly dumped the fruit from each pallet onto the conveyor that would take it down the line.