Apr 7, 2007

Baby-food Maker Finds Harvest Time A Strain

It was the first week of summer and already it was too hot. Too hot for peas, anyway, and too hot for the harvest schedule that had been set up at planting time 50 days earlier.

There wasn’t much that could be done about it, except harvest as fast as possible and hope for cooler weather. If hot weather persisted, it could have resulted in some acres being bypassed.

In late June, pea harvest had just started for Gerber Products Company. The first fields for harvest were at the farms of Paul Main and Brian and Jeff Hansen near Trufant in Montcalm County, Mich. Harvest operations were under the direction of chief vegetable buyer (and hands-on field man) Chris Falak.

Montcalm County growers are serious producers of processing vegetable crops like peas, green beans and potatoes. Most of the land is irrigated with center pivot systems and aerial application is widely used for pest control.

Pest control is usually not needed for peas, but water is. Because peas are grown to a schedule, they are planted and irrigated immediately to assure even emergence. There’s no place in the system for peas that are late. Slightly less than 600,000 peas are planted per acre for a once-over harvest that, under good conditions, will generate 4,500 pounds of Grade A peas. Grade A peas are what modern moms want in those Gerber baby food jars.

Growers are paid according to yield and grade, Falak said. Bigger peas yield more but grade less well, so on balance, revenue evens out per acre. Peas normally yield from 4,000 to 4,500 pounds per acre.

Falak said that this year, Gerber contracted with several growers in west central Michigan for production of 2,600 acres of peas. Gerber tells its growers what variety to plant and when, and it’s up to Falak to make the schedule. Since he’s no better at forecasting long-term weather than the weatherman, he bases his schedule on weather records and growing-degree days above base 40? F.

It doesn’t take long to mess up a harvest schedule when day temperatures hit 95º F and night temperatures stay above 70º F. Not when you’ve projected 80º F and 60º F.

Growers for Gerber provide and prepare land, plant the crop and handle things like irrigation and weed control. Falak monitors the fields and keeps updating his estimates of when harvest will begin. Once into harvest, the monitoring continues and his judgment will be confirmed by objective tests that tell just how tender and good the peas are.

The company uses a Tenderometer, a machine that measures shear force – the pressure it takes to shove a dish of peas through holes in a strainer. Grade A peas take less force than lower grades.

A crew from Gerber does the harvesting. On a good day, the crew will harvest 125 acres of peas, sending a semi-load out every hour and a quarter. The equipment includes three harvesters, one dumper box pulled by a tracked Caterpillar Challenger that races about picking up 500 pounds at a time from the harvesters, and three semi-trucks. There’s also a night crew that comes in every evening after harvest ends and power-washes the harvesters inside and out.

And don’t forget the mechanic. He works full-time, restoring the harvesters every winter and tending them every day in the field. A breakdown is a major catastrophe. A harvester costs more than $400,000, and the cost of idle machines and crews shows up as lost work, poorer quality peas and acres that are bypassed when they get too ripe. Gerber pays its growers for peas that can’t be harvested.

So a machine plug-up isn’t just an “aw, shucks” thing. The three harvesters work close together and Falak keeps an eye on them. Members of the crew have walkie-talkies, so they can coordinate among themselves and with Falak, who works out of the cab of his pickup truck. Today, he’s sending out mixed messages: hurry up but go slow, no faster than 3.5 miles per hour. Driving faster would get more peas in the bin before they mature, but it could result in a plug-up.

“The last plug-up cost us four hours,” Falak said.

Peas are a green, watery, heavy plant. The harvester is very much like a rotary combine used for grain, but instead of separating dry grain from dry straw, this harvester separates wet peas from wet plants – and if that rotating chamber plugs up, getting it cleaned out takes a major effort.

The pickup head on these harvesters rotates against the direction of travel, stripping pods and leaves from pea plants. To work properly, the combine head must stay level and hug the ground. That’s partly done by putting the machine on six large flotation tires, but the whole machine is on a chassis that can be leveled hydraulically.

On this day, however, everything was going smoothly. Falak was still nervous because it was obvious the heat was going to wreck the schedule. But the only thing the mechanic needed to do was keep the air conditioners running in the harvester cabs.

What happens to the peas after they leave the farm? The trucks go to Chase Farms in Walkerville, Falak said, about 30 miles away from the main pea production area. There, peas are plunged into cold water to remove field heat and washed to remove sand, leaves and pods. Peas are packed into boxes and hauled to Gerber, a few miles away in Fremont.

Some peas are processed immediately. Some are frozen for later processing.

Paul Main’s Farm

This year, Gerber started a recognition program and named Paul Main as the first Gerber Vegetable Grower of the Year.

“They put on a dinner for us and gave us a nice plaque,” Main said.

Main Farms is located in Six Lakes. Paul and his wife, Joan, have run the family operation since 1979. Today, it encompasses 6,500 acres, 90 percent of it irrigated with center pivots. This year, 350 acres are devoted to peas, 1,900 acres to potatoes, 350 acres to sugar beets and the rest to field corn for seed, corn and wheat. Some years, he also grows green beans for Gerber.

Main is used to growing vegetable crops under contract, and likes it.

“It’s definitely lower risk,” he said. “Price is established going in, and you don’t need to manipulate the market – or be manipulated by it.”

He grows seed corn for Pioneer, chipping potatoes for Frito-Lay, peas and beans for Gerber and sugar beets for Michigan Sugar Co., a grower-owned cooperative that contracts for acreage.

Peas, he said, are a nice crop to grow.

“It’s a short-term crop, a 60-day turnaround. We plant in April and we’re paid by July. You can’t do much better than that.”

Potatoes, by contrast, are planted in April, harvested in early fall, put into storage and packed out as needed up until June the following year.

Gerber is a good company to grow for, Main said.

Gerber demands a long rotation of four years between pea crops, to break pest cycles and make sure chemical inputs can be kept low. That fits well with the way Main Farms operates. Rotations and cover crops are used routinely. After the peas came off in late June, for example, the pea-vine residue was worked into the soil immediately.

“We let the land lay idle for a few weeks, then we plant oats as a cover crop,” Main said. “We can go to about any crop we’d like to next spring.”

The oats have plenty of time to develop growth in the fall. They produce organic matter that keeps the soil healthy and they tie up nitrogen and other nutrients that might otherwise leach away. Winter weather kills them, leaving a mat of residue that incorporates easily.

Main Farms is large enough to hire about 10 people year round and another 20 people seasonally.

“I don’t spent as much time on a tractor as I used to,” Main said, noting that management and coordination of the cropping efforts take most of his time.

His wife keeps books and records. They have three children from sixth grade to college, including a son who’s a high school senior and very interested in farming.

What’s the secret to success growing contract vegetables?

“You have to be able to do a good job and pay attention to details,” he said. “You have to have good land, good equipment and know-how. Good equipment includes irrigation. It’s pretty much a key for vegetable production.

“There are a lot of opportunities in our area for growers who can do it. There was a big shake-out among farmers when Ore-Ida closed its processing potato plant here some years ago, but there are some solid companies to grow for, like Gerber and Frito-Lay.”

So how does this story end?

“It stayed hot and we ended up by-passing some acres,” Main said. “It was a tough year for my field man, Chris Falak.”

Gerber Awards Program

Gerber Products Company has named three farmers winners of its Produce Supplier Awards, a program started this year.

Paul Main of Six Lakes, Mich., who grows peas and green beans for Gerber, was named Vegetable Supplier of the Year.

Alex R. Thomas and Company of Ukiah, Calif., which grows pears for Gerber, was named Fruit Supplier of the Year.

Art Lister Sr. of Ludington, Mich., won the Lifetime Achievement Award for being a consistent supplier of peaches, pears, plums and apples to Gerber for more than 50 years.

Todd DeKryger, manager of global ag research for Gerber, said the awards were based on several criteria: adherence to good farming practices, communications and cooperation with Gerber staff, consistency in quality and quantity, ability to increase supply when needed and ability to provide electronic spray-history records.

The lifetime achievement award applied the same criteria over several years and considered industry leadership as well.

Main was lauded for his cooperation in on-farm research and for the fact that he “bent over backwards for the bean and pea crews without question.”

Lister has long been a leader in the Michigan horticulture industry, was president of the state’s horticulture society in 1994 and has been active in Gerber ag research. Gerber peach research trials on the Lister farm included studies of insecticides, varieties, ripening, oriental fruit moth mating disruption and rose chafer mass trapping. Plum trials focused on insecticides and varieties. Apple work included IPM and trials on reduction or elimination of organophosphate insecticides. The Listers hosted tours bringing EPA administrators to their orchards.

Alexander Ramsey “Tom” Thomas III is president of Alex R. Thomas and Company, which has supplied pears to Gerber for 20 years. The company started in 1906 and now grows more than 800 acres of pears, hiring about 1,100 people during peak harvest in August. Eleven members of the Thomas family are involved in the business today.