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| Bing image of Henry Fields Seeds & Nursery, 5200 Schenley Place, Greendale, Indiana |
I'll be taking stock and placing my seed orders very soon. I thought it might be a useful service to post some information about the companies from which I primarily buy vegetable seed. The series is titled "May I recommend: ____ ?" I started with one of my favorite sources for melons and more, New Hope Seed Company. [Disclaimer: I am a customer of the companies I'll post about. Nothing more.] There are others. What they have in common is that-- at least as far as I've been able to ascertain-- they are privately owned "family" businesses. This is not to say they are all small, but they are not BAD big.
Thinking about this, I was reminded of something that happened several years ago which led me to do some fairly thorough research on ownership of seed companies. Someone told me that Henry Fields Seeds & Nursery, "a household name for all your... since 1892," was located in Greendale, IN, which was on our way to a range we liked. I thought, even if the nursery weren't open to the public, I'd be able to see from afar what a commercial nursery looked like. Did I ever. This led me to do some digging around.
I wrote about the racket here, and followed up here. Bottom line? Monsanto.
[If you have comments, please come back here. I don't look at the linked site anymore. Thanks!]
Wow, great digging Marica, I never thought to google map the "family run" businesses I run across, now I will.
ReplyDeleteAnd seeing it in real life when we went looking was amazing! There really is a sign that says "Henry Fields" right about the truck dock.
ReplyDeleteI have another article in the same vein - though at the moment, I'm not certain it isn't yours - but I have to find it. I'll post it when I do.
ReplyDeleteSeminis is a local company for us. At least their plant is. And the large ag fields around us supply some of their seed, I think. Virtually certain about the squashes - zucchini and crookneck, and cucumbers - because they're not picked - they're allowed to mature and machine harvested, chopping up the squashes in the process. We're in a pretty Ag concentrated area. You know seasons by the crops in the fields - right now, it's primarily celery.
This is likely to change over the next decade or so. The big money maker now is raspberries. Raspberries are a capital intensive 3-5 year crop. They put up big hoop houses - acres and acres of them - after the plants are started and the support wires and irrigation tubes are put in - and are picked after about 6 months. Then the plants are cut back and defoliated, grow back and produce a second crop. They do this 2-3 times, then everything is taken down, the field is plowed and new plants are started, and the cycle begins again.
I've been told that it takes an investment of $20,000 per acre to raise the raspberries. I can believe it, but I can't say I know that to be a fact.
Watching over the last 10 years or so as they've taken over lemon groves and tracts of land that had been dedicated to other crops, I have to believe that if that's true, it must be a heck of a money maker because more and more of the local acreage is being covered by plastic.
Wow. This is interesting stuff. I had no idea that's how commercial raspberries were grown. SOunds like Big Ag!
ReplyDeleteFor us, of course, the money crop is cotton. For some unknown reason, I have a subscription to "Cotton Farming." Enlightening.
Question: Has all of this land changed hands? I'm assuming so, right?
No way to tell. I know of one piece that was a lemon grove - but never did too well for whatever reason. When Dad died, and son-in-law became the authority, he did as he had recommended to his FIL, but FIL never heeded - and leased the acreage out to the raspberry guys. I suspect that many of the properties are leased to various companies who don't want to invest the money in land ownership - the cost of the improvements is so high, and temporary as well. The land owners may not be familiar with the techniques required, and are just as content to live on their land collect the lease fees and not have to worry about it. Or maybe they sharecrop - I really don't know.
ReplyDeleteI gotta tell you though...on that particular lemon grove I mentioned... Step one is to pull up (not cut down, pull up!) all the lemon trees. They used to then pile them up to dry, and burn them. Apparently in this case, the time required was too long for the lessee, so they brought in these _HUMONGOUS_ shredders, and with their big monster machines just lifted tree by tree and dropped them into the bin to be shredded. Took about 5-10 minutes for each tree to be turned into sawdust, which was then plowed into the ground. It was enough to give you nightmares!
Since I make the rules here in the comments section, I can say without fear of having my mouth washed out or suffering any other penalty, "Holy fuck."
ReplyDeleteShredding citrus trees.
May they all rot in scurvy hell. Each and every one of them.
Well...truth is, citrus trees have a limited production lifetime. This sort of thing happens for two reasons: the grove is past peak production and becoming more and more subject to whatever feasts upon it's corpus, and second, for whatever reason (often, a massive surplus of lemons in any particular year) the price of lemons drops to the point that it costs more to harvest same lemons than to let them rot on the tree or on the ground. In fact, if the latter is the case, the grove owner still has expenses, since the lemons have to be taken off the trees in order for more to grow the next year - in other words, the grove has become a liability, not a source of income.
ReplyDeleteI'm watching one piece of acreage now - the trees were pulled (or pushed, as the case may be)out of the ground, and shredded. Then they plowed and cross plowed, brought out the surveyers and meticulously leveled the ground. Then put in deeply raised bed rows. And then nothing. It's time for strawberries - in fact, it's late for strawberries. That would mean irrigation tubing down the rows, then plastic on top, then the holes in the plastic for the plants to go into, and finally the plants. Not happening.
Or if raspberries, they wouldn't have mounded the rows. So...??? I'm still waiting and watching. Some new crop? Curiosity abounds!
Well, keep us posted. My curiosity is also piqued. What will be planted in the mounds??
ReplyDeleteThe whole discussion reminds me of mountain top removal. Literally. Mountain. Top. Removal. Silly us, we thought of buying land in eastern Kentucky, until we saw mountain top removal first hand. (Land there is cheap, by the way!)
>>Land there is cheap, by the way!>>
ReplyDeleteUmmm...The land on top, or after it's been removed?
I don't want to go down this road. I already have. Timber rights. Mining rights.
ReplyDeleteAh.
ReplyDeleteWe visited New Mexico once. Beautiful country. Very dry.
Water rights do not transfer with land you might buy. You might have a river crossing your property, but if you don't own the water rights, you can't take any of the water from that river.
Water rights cost about the same as the property you buy - if the water rights are for sale.
Not going down that road either!