The Perfect Fruit

by Chip Brantley

  “Sometimes you can look at the perfect piece of fruit and say, ‘Man, that is a nice piece of fruit. But it just doesn’t make sense for me.’ And then if I’ve got five years left on these Friars, then in five years there’s probably going to be something else coming along that’s even better [than Flavor Grenade]. So it’s a moving target.”

  Rod explained that you also had to think about logistics. If you had a variety you wanted to pull out, you had to think not just about what else you had going on during that part of the season. You had to think about what was adjacent to that part of your orchard. For example, you didn’t want to put in a variety you’d have to pick mid-season next to a variety you’d have to spray mid-season. The spray could drift over and settle on the fruit. You had to consider the ground you’d be planting in; in general, peaches and nectarines were less forgiving of poor soil than plums were. If possible, you wanted to put a plum next to another plum that could act as a pollinator. And the list of considerations went on. “There are a ton of factors to consider and you can talk yourself into any number of them,” Rod said.

  One other thing Rod had to think about when choosing varieties was what Rick had planted in his orchard. Since they often shared a crew, they tried to coordinate on varieties so that they weren’t too heavy during any one part of the season. We were headed to Rick’s place now to see how his Grand Rosas were coming. When we pulled up to the house, the brothers’ father, Richard, was sitting in his truck waiting for a load of the plums. At eighty-one, Richard was mostly retired but still hauled fruit over to Ballantine during the season.

  While Rod went to check on the crew back at his place, I climbed into the passenger side of Richard’s pickup. A trailer of Grand Rosas—Rick’s last load—was on its way over. They took one load per hour over to Ballantine, four bins loaded with about a thousand pounds of Grand Rosas apiece. Right on cue, a tractor appeared with four bins. Richard got out and guided the bins onto the trailer hitched to his truck, and then we were off. We passed a field of artichokes, then some turnips and eggplants, and then turned into Ballantine’s delivery entrance and stopped under a giant porte cochere. Richard unlatched the trailer, which tilted backward slightly from the weight. He leaned down and pushed the two back bins, causing the whole four thousand pounds worth of plums to slide down the trailer, then climbed back in the truck and eased it forward so that the last bins slid off. He went into a side office and picked up a receiving certificate, a yellow 5 × 8-inch card with his grower number and information on what and how much he’d brought in. While he did that, I watched a guy on a forklift zip around the loading area, moving fruit around. He speared the four Milton bins and carried them through a large freight door. Inside, the fruit would be sorted, sized, packed, and then, given the current state of the market, probably stuck in the cooler for a while.

  As we unloaded, I asked Richard if he’d seen a market as bad as this one. “Well, I’m sure I have. But if agriculture had a brain in her head, she’d just say, ‘No! Hell no!’ It would take only a week and then the week after would be the most profitable week you’d ever see. The thing that is bad about our world today—and this is age talking here—is that we don’t know how to say no to anything.”

  After our Grand Rosa run to Ballantine, Richard dropped me off at the old packing shed to his house. Rod was on his forklift, stacking some empty bins that had been dropped off from Ballantine. As Rod finished, a field manager from Ballan-tine pulled up. He’d stopped by to coordinate with Rod about the next several days. “On the Arctic Blaze [peaches],” he said, shaking his head, “we’re just picking forty-eight and larger.” Rod sighed. The field manager turned to me and said, “Last year, we sold out of seventy-twos.”

  Peach sizes are determined by how many pieces of fruit fit in the box. The smaller the number, the larger the fruit. Last year, they were able to sell out of smaller peaches. This year, they were backed up on fruit that was much larger. Not a good sign.

  I asked the field manager what they did with the smaller fruit.

  “You watch them fall to the ground,” the field guy said. He shook his head and said, “This is definitely the worst year I’ve seen in my lifetime. I’ve never, ever seen it as bad as I’ve seen it this year.”

  “What is it about this year?”

  “Nobody really knows. That’s the worst part. But I think one thing is that the export market is way down,” Rod said. “Some people think that’s because they’ve had a real light typhoon season in Asia, so a lot of their local fruit is coming on in a way it normally doesn’t.

  “I think it’s probably a lot of things like that,” said the field manager. “You look at the buyers and you see that they’re selling less fruit. They had sixty million boxes of stone fruit three years ago and now they’ve got forty-eight million, but they’re not putting any of it on sale. They’re selling less fruit for more.

  “You’ve got incredible fruit and it’s selling for thirty-nine cents a pound on the wholesale market in Los Angeles,” said Rod. “When it’s thirty-nine cents a pound in Los Angeles, you know you’re in trouble.”

  The field guy shrugged and drove off, and I could tell Rod was eager to go check on his crew. I was planning to make some stops in Reedley before heading back to the hotel, but Rod told me to check back by the shed later. He’d see if he could get a box of fruit put together for me. “It’s a little early for them, but I’ll see if I can find some Flavor Kings that are ready.”

  A couple of hours later, I stopped at Rod’s small shed and found a cardboard box filled with fruit. It was indeed a little early for the Flavor Kings—the first one crunched when I took a bite—but in a good year like this one, a slightly unripe Flavor King was better than most other plums at their best.

  I was eating a second one in the car when I heard a radio ad for Von’s. The grocery chain was promoting a big sale. It was for grapes.

  2

  BY AN ORDER of magnitude, Gerawan Farming is the largest stone fruit grower in the country. Ray Gerawan and his sons are notorious for keeping to themselves—except for when they don’t keep to themselves, and then they’re notorious for saying and doing things that a) infuriate, b) appear to belittle, and/or c) strike fear in fellow stone fruit growers. Legendary stories about the Gerawans’ disinterest in tact float around the Valley. They are best known for a series of incendiary statements they made in various courts and hearings, the gist of which could be summed up in Ray’s public claim that his “goal as a businessman was to put [his] competitors out of business.” Their strain of rational self-interest was pure and their promotion of laissez-faire principles was never sugarcoated. (If Ayn Rand had written a novel about fruit growing, she could have found no better Objectivist hero than Ray Gerawan.)

  The Gerawans had led the charge against the Plum Marketing Board in the early 1990s and eventually convinced enough plum growers to vote themselves out of the federal marketing order. Once the plum growers voted themselves back into the mandatory marketing order at the state level, the Gerawans sued the Plum Marketing Board in state court. In fact, many people speculated that the reason the California Department of Food and Agriculture had refused to intervene in the pluot issue was because the Gerawans had kept the state so tangled in legal battles that it was afraid to weigh in on any new issue that involved peaches, plums, or nectarines. During my time in the Valley, I heard all kinds of words used to describe Ray Gerawan, and none of them was flattering. That made it all the more impressive that I never once heard a bad word about the Gerawans’ fruit. The company’s Prima brand was the premier plum label in the industry. People talked about its consistently high quality with something approaching reverence.

  I’d heard so much about Ray Gerawan that I couldn’t imagine not meeting the man. After a series of phone calls with his son Dan, I found myself on the way to Ray’s house one Sunday afternoon. On the eastern side of Reedley, I passed Gerawan Farming’s main packing facility, a big rectangular fortress. I cut north and dr
ove almost to where the road hit the foothills. Tall evergreens out front hid a beautiful, low 1960s hacienda-style ranch. A tall, handsome man in his seventies answered the door. He was on the phone, speaking Spanish. He nodded and motioned for me to follow him inside. The inside was airy and open but barely lit. We walked to a sunroom in the back of the house, where he sat at a table and finished his conversation. In an ashtray, a Marlboro Light was burning down. He lit another and hung up the phone.

  “I’m learning more Spanish.”

  “A good language to know.”

  “So you’re interested in stone fruit breeders?” He’d had enough of the chitchat. “I’ve put hundreds of thousands—millions—of dollars into patent payments and replantings and variety changes,” he said evenly. “They should do more testing and somebody should take them to court to hold them accountable so that they make sure the varieties do the things they say they’re going to do.” He blew out a long line of smoke in my general direction.

  Ray’s family moved from Oklahoma when he was five. His father bought forty acres of land near the foothills, land that “even God didn’t want.” The family grew a little bit of everything. Santa Rosa plums. Elberta peaches. Grapes. Okra. Ray began working by digging ditches, picking fruit, walking behind a mule. A year after he finished high school, he bought his first ranch. He had good years and bad years, dabbling in this and that. By the 1970s, he had built up a big stone fruit business that prized volume over quality. He picked every piece of fruit he could get into the box. If somebody would buy it, he would pack it.

  When he was in his mid-forties, his wife left him, and the separation prompted a Siddhartha-like walkabout. Every morning for two years, he woke up and walked up into the foothills to wander and think. One morning, he ran across a Canadian hiker, and the two men started talking about life. After listening to Ray for a while, the hiker remarked that his philosophy of life reminded him of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. When Ray returned home, he bought the book, and it was partly responsible for his return to the workaday life of growing and packing stone fruit. His sons had all but taken over the company and, with his blessing, they were shifting the focus of Gerawan Farming from quantity to quality. This was around the same time that the hegemony of the Big Eight was breaking up, and it was a good time to make the change.

  The Prophet became Ray’s Bible. “It’s very important to me now,” he said, pointing to a bound copy on the table and breathing out another long line of smoke. “And he was Lebanese, like I am.”

  I mentioned the CTFA lawsuit and his public statements about the industry. How did his philosophy of business mesh with Gibran?

  “My philosophy is survival of the fittest. In this family, we’re real big on free enterprise. As I told the federal attorney, my philosophy is to try to put my competitors out of business. And when I said that, I meant it as a challenge to my competitors to try to put me out of business. Because that makes us all stronger.”

  “Do you socialize with anybody in the business?”

  “No!”

  “Is it because you don’t want to socialize with people who you’re trying to put out of business?”

  “No, it’s not that. The reason why I don’t socialize with them is because all these guys want to talk about is fruit. Fruit, fruit, fruit, fruit, fruit, fruit, fruit. It’s not that I hate fruit. It’s just that I’m saturated by it.”

  “Are you sympathetic to the plight of the small guys out there who are going out of business?”

  “Do I sound like I’d be sympathetic to that? Do I sound like I’m sympathetic to anything?”

  “But what about the value of having competition? Isn’t it good to have lots of competition?”

  He shook his head. “The plum deal is finished anyway. It’s a much harder pack. The buyers want a fixed quantity for the year and won’t come down on price. They’re not willing to come up on volume.”

  It was the same thing I’d been hearing from everybody else.

  A few days later, I met Ray for breakfast at the Main Street Cafe, in Reedley. He wanted me to meet Russ Tavlan, a young, like-minded guy who ran his own farming company. When I showed up, Ray was sitting at a table up front, talking on his cell phone. He gave me a quick nod and then went back to his phone conversation for a few more minutes until Russ showed up.

  “I just talked to John,” Ray said to Russ, “and got the price down two dollars a box so that I could move the fruit on the street.” John was a wholesaler on the East Coast. The market was still way down and fruit was stacking up in cold storage facilities all across the Valley. By cutting the price for the wholesaler, Ray was open to clearing a lot of fruit out of cold storage, which would bring the market back up for the first several weeks of August.

  “Why did you do that?” Russ demanded. “You devalued one of your quality retail partners. These are the guys that butter your bread, and you’ve just come off two dollars.” The wholesaler did occasional business with some of the same retailers with whom Gerawan dealt directly. Russ was concerned that by lowering the price for the wholesaler, Ray would be in danger of competing with himself.

  “So?”

  “So? Well, number one: It’s proven that two dollars isn’t enough to move volume. Number two: I don’t believe this theory that there’s a correlation between retail and street. Anyway, I sent him an e-mail last night and wrote: ‘You better pull some Prima nectarine or Ray Gerawan’s going to cut your balls off.’ ”

  Ray looked at me and smiled. “I’ve been training him.”

  “I’ve been training him!” Russ shot back. “I’m keeping him tethered to society.”

  To Russ, Ray said, “Chip’s been hearing bad things about me in the industry.”

  Russ nodded and said, “The industry loves to hate Gerawan. It’s systemic in Gerawan that it doesn’t seem to make any mistakes. People just can’t believe the consistent quality. That’s what distinguishes them. The first box looks the same as the box fifty thousand boxes later.”

  Russ’s cell phone rang. It was John. Russ answered and said, “We gonna do business, you parasite?”

  After he hung up, Russ said, “Ray’s got people who need Gerawan Farming. It’s a different paradigm. You’ve got regional and national chains whose whole programs are based on the Prima label. A place like Kingsburg Orchards has built their entire business on niches. Gerawan has built his business on mainstream varieties.”

  Ray, who was eating strawberry jelly with the tip of a knife, kept silent, and Russ looked at me solemnly. “Listen, Ray’s never sought the limelight, but he’s also never shied away from saying what’s on his mind. And that’s a rarity in this business. When I was getting going, he said, ‘Russ, if you do this, your only goal should be to put me out of business. That’s your only goal. If it’s not, then get the fuck out right now!’ ”

  Ray pointed at me and said, “That’s ‘g-e-t . . . ’ ” His phone interrupted him. He answered and went back to haggling over nectarines.

  As Russ half-listened to Ray’s conversation, he explained that times like this were why he loved stone fruit. “It’s the fastest-paced crop, and the tight-knit family business has the ability to react faster than any big corporation. What you get in agriculture outside of stone fruit, it’s a world dominated by large, global enterprises. But in stone fruit, the big corporations have come and gone.”

  I asked Russ what he thought was going on with the market.

  “The supply is surpassing any of our expectations. The fruit quality is incredible. It’s everything we strive for. But there’s too much of it.”

  “In a market like this, does the need for an organization like the CTFA become more apparent?”

  “Of course not!” Ray had hung up the phone and heard me ask Russ the question. “I don’t believe there’s any benefit to any associations of any kind at any time.”

  “Ray likes to hit you over the head with a bag of nickels and see how you react,” Russ said to me. “He’s the Howard Ster
n of the fruit business.”

  “More like the Howard Hughes,” I said.

  “Well, maybe a little bit of both.”

  3

  WHILE THE WRANGLING over the pluot’s identity sometimes made it seem as if the Zaigers were the only stone fruit breeders in town, they had plenty of competition. In addition to the breeders working at the universities and at the USDA, Gerawan had its own in-house breeding program, which, judging by the consistently good quality of its fruit, seemed to be a success. Another large farming company called Sun World International had a proprietary plum breeding program that was built on the work of a legendary breeder named John Weinberger, who had introduced, among other things, the Flame Seedless grape. The Zaigers’ main rival, though, was Bradford Gene tics, the modern incarnation of Fred Anderson’s breeding operation in Le Grand.

  Norman Bradford, now retired in his eighties, had worked most of his life as Fred Anderson’s field manager. When Anderson retired, Norman and his son Glen bought the ranch and continued the breeding program. The Zaigers and Bradfords were cordial and cooperative but kept a respectable distance from each other. Patent law made it illegal to use pollen from someone else’s protected varieties. The Zaigers and Bradfords also had a gentleman’s agreement not to use each other’s un-patented cultivars.

  Having continued the work of the Father of the Modern Nectarine, the Bradfords were known mostly for their work with that fruit. But in the past decade, they had begun impressing a lot of people with their plums. Just as the Zaigers used Red Beaut, an old Anderson variety, as one of the foundations of their pluot line, the Bradfords based most of their plums on an old red-fleshed Anderson cultivar that had been on the ranch when they bought it. The Bradfords’ foundation plum, like Red Beaut, was a direct descendant of one of Burbank’s original twelve Japanese plums, probably the Blood Plum of Satsuma (according to Burbank, the Blood Plum was the only of his original red-fleshed Japanese plums he continued to use as his breeding program progressed).