Stewardship good business for Sakuma Brothers

by R.W. Clever

 

It wasn’t easy for the Sakuma Family to make the decision to convert those first few dozen acres of prime blueberry lands from tried and true conventional methods to organic.

Such a monumental step was not to be taken lightly. As are most decisions affecting the future of Sakuma Brothers Farms, the advantages and disadvantages of the move were considered from all angles by family members over a long stretch of time.

Actually, about 20 years.

That’s how much time passed after Steve Sakuma was first approached by Small Planet Foods founder and CEO Gene Kahn, who wanted to get Skagit County’s premier berry farmers under his label.

Twenty years ago organic farming methods were still considered impractical on a large scale. Traditional farmers in Skagit County looked on with great skepticism as a ragtag band of young idealists scratched away at the ground in the Upper Skagit Valley in the 1970s.

Kahn was the leader of that optimistic enterprise which eventually became Cascadian Farms and Small Planet Foods – one of the great success stories in a still-small agricultural sector that has finally won an important place at the American dinner table.

Anyone passing the Cascadian roadside stand on Highway 20 just past Rockport can stop and wander through lush demonstration gardens and be treated to the sight of some 50 acres of thriving bushes with succulent blueberries the size of grapes.

But what Kahn understood early on was that marketing was the key to survival and growth. The Cascadian and Small Planet labels on canned and frozen fruits and vegetables gradually gained acceptance and finally attracted the attention of food industry giant General Mills, which bought the company in 1999.

Still, the Cascadian and Small Planet operations remain a separately operated entity run by Kahn, who continued to aggressively seek out more farmers willing to adopt the company’s tough organic standards.

After 20 years of weighing the pros and cons of going organic, the Sakuma Family was presented by Kahn with an offer they couldn’t refuse. Small Planet Foods would lease Sakuma land at an annual rate, pay all production costs and share in the profits. If there was a crop failure in any given year, Small Planet would still pay the rent.

Steve Sakuma, the retired Army colonel who now heads the Sakuma enterprises, was a hard sell on the idea. But he is now a believer in organic methods and expects to expand the acreage devoted to berries grown without agricultural chemicals.

“The hardest part about going organic was making the decision to do it,” said Sakuma. “Actually doing it has proved to be not that difficult.”

Obviously, the hope is that the profit margins on organic produce will justify the slightly higher labor costs.

Admittedly, the incentives built into the contract with Small Planet were significant.

In fact, said Craig Weakley, vice president of agriculture for Small Planet Foods, the contract reduced the Sakuma risk to “zero.”

“It is a custom farming arrangement modeled on some of the custom farming arrangements we had on vegetable crops in Eastern Washington,” said Weakley.

Weakley said it was a major coup for Small Planet to persuade the Sakuma’s, the county’s premier berry growers, to convert significant acreage to organic production.

“They are great people to work with,” he said.

Sakuma Brothers Farms this summer delivered its first harvest of organic blueberries to Small Planet Foods. The berries came off of a 25-acre tract of land at the foot of Bow Hill. The tract had been under transition from conventional methods for three years and finally had won its organic certification from the State Department of Agriculture.

The Sakumas have 30 acres of raspberries that will be certified next season, said Richard Sakuma, who oversees the farming and fresh market operations. That is a small part of the nearly 1,500 acres the Sakuma’s farm in the Skagit flats, but they expect the organic side to grow in coming years.

The biggest adjustment the Sakuma operation had to make in the transition to organic was in ratcheting up attention to growing conditions.

“You become a better monitor of conditions,” said Richard. The organic crops are watched closely for the appearance of pests, for example. But when pests show up in the traps that doesn’t necessarily mean that you hit the panic button.

“It is more waiting and seeing,” said Richard. “Without the Small Planet assurances we would have had a lot more gray hair.”

Richard and his organic farming operations manager, Jess Carkner, work closely with Small Planet’s farming and research team on everything from insect to weed control.

The emphasis is not on weed eradication, but control. Weeds are seen as part of the biodiversity of a field and not necessarily something to be stamped out as long as they don’t flourish at the expense of the crop. The details on how this is accomplished are a bit hazy, and for good reason, said Small Planet’s Weakley.

Much of the cultural practices utilized in the Sakuma organic operation and with other Small Planet contract growers are considered “proprietary,” said Weakley.

Techniques developed by Cascadian over time that make possible the growth of organic fruits and vegetables on a large scale represent the company’s competitive edge, he said.

“We’re certainly not the only organic farmers out there,” said Weakley. “What small advantage we get out of our proprietary knowledge is short term at best. People change jobs, taking information with them.”

Weakley couldn’t be more pleased with having the Sakuma’s as partners.

“There is proprietary information that is available only to the Sakuma Brothers and Small Planet Foods,” he said. “There is a synergy in our relationship with the Sakumas. We both have a commitment to research on organic methods.”

In the Sakuma operation, Small Planet has the advantage of working with third and fourth generation farmers with an intimate knowledge of the land. Each family member engaged in farming has his area of expertise.

Steve Sakuma, now 55, is the overall manager of the family enterprise. His cousin, Richard, 47, manages the farming operations in Skagit County while cousins Bryan, 46, and Glenn, 40, handle the processing plant.

Steve’s brother, Ron, and cousin John handle the family’s sprawling nursery operations in Redding and Turlock, in California’s Central Valley. In fact, Steve would be in California helping with the harvest from late September to early November.

The Sakuma processing plant is the only facility in Skagit County for the flash freezing of berries. The company has undertaken a $2 million expansion of the processing plant to handle what the Sakuma’s expect to be expanded production for both the organic and conventional crop. The plant also processes berries from other farmers in the valley.

It has been quite an odyssey for the Sakuma Family, whose founders arrived in the Skagit Valley back in the 1930s to raise strawberries. There were half a dozen brothers working the berry fields when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought American into World War II. Like other American citizens of Japanese descent, the Sakuma Family was sent off to internment camps inland from the West Coast.

More fortunate than many Japanese-Americans who were stripped of their possessions, the Sakumas were able to return to their land in the Skagit Valley and resume farming.

On a drizzly fall day, Richard Sakuma reflected on how far the family has come from those early days.

“The World War II experience intensified the determination to succeed and reinforced the reliance on the family,” he said.

All the Sakuma kids learned early in their lives what hard work was all about. They worked summers on the farms, learning every phase of the operation. However, when it came time to choose careers, there was no pressure put on any one of them to go into farming.

“My dad didn’t push me into it,” said Richard. “It was just something I wanted to do.”

Richard attended Spokane Community College, which offered a two-year associate’s degree in agricultural science, before going to work full time on the farm.

Whatever the ultimate choice of a Sakuma for career, the values of hard work, instilled by the previous generation, are the guiding principle.

“The family is the key,” said Richard. “We all get along. There aren’t any overpowering egos. Steve is, of course, in charge overall but decision-making wise it’s a committee. We don’t have any control freaks.”

Steve retired about 5 years ago as a colonel from the Army after a 25-year career. He brought a new level of structure and corporate sophistication to what had until then been a fairly simply family operation.

“After Steve came back, we structured it a little better,” said Richard. “Things kind of fell together. We had a series of family meetings and did some strategic planning. We got our attorney involved.”

The Sakuma operations were divided into three subdivisions – farming, processing and nursery – all under the control of a holding company headed by Steve Sakuma.

Steve is president of Sakuma Brothers Holding Company, Richard is vice president, Bryan is secretary and Ronald is treasurer.

Under the umbrella of the holding company are Sakuma Brothers Farms, Inc., Sakuma Brothers Processing, Inc., and Sakland Enterprises, through which much of the Sakuma land is owned and administered.

In California, Ronald heads up the NorCal Nursery operations out of Red Bluff, in the Sacramento Valley, and oversees the company’s holdings in the Turlock area of the San Joaquin Valley.

Although the companies were restructured, there are Sakumas running every phase. That much has not changed and likely never will.

But the move toward organics did represent a significant change for Sakuma Brothers Farms. Steve, interviewed by telephone from his office in Turlock, Calif., reflected on the process by which he and the family made the decision to go with the Small Planet program.

“Actually farming organic has not been as difficult as it was to actually make the decision to go organic,” he said. “It took us a long while to make that decision.”

Among the happy surprises once the transition to organic methods began on the acreage selected for the process was that knowledge spilled over into the conventional operations.

“Conventional growers often don’t know where the envelope is,” said Steve, referring to the difficulty farmers have in understanding just how little of a chemical they can get away with using in their usual cultural practices.

“Organics require you to take a different look at it; it gives you a basis for comparison,” said Steve.

He said that in many situations the non-organic side of the farming operation is learning that it can function with fewer chemical applications than before.

Small Planet’s Weakley notes that while organic agriculture is showing signs of broader acceptance it still only comprises one to 1.5 percent of all the acreage under cultivation in the United States.

Skagit County leads the rest of Western Washington counties with 1,339 acres under organic cultivation. Grant County, in Eastern Washington, has the largest acreage being farmed organically at 7,149 acres, much of it in tree fruit.

As of December of last year in Washington, according to the state Department of Agriculture, there were 32,673 acres being farmed organically with another 4,700 acres under transition.

The organics movement got a big boost in October when the U.S. Department of Agriculture put into effect new national organic standards intended to ensure consistency for all organic products marketed in the U.S.

Any product displaying the USDA Organic seal will have been certified at least 95 percent organic. Products with a lower percentage of organic ingredients won’t be able to use the USDA Organic seal.

The Sakumas will expand their organic operations as the market for the products grows. But for them, it isn’t about the money, or the preservation of wealth, says Steve Sakuma.

He sees the organic operation as much better for the health of the soil in the long term.

“The basis for our business is the family,” he said. “Now we’re looking at the next generation.”

“It’s not just about the preservation of wealth, but of a way of life,” said Steve. “We don’t just look at the profit for today, but also for what will be left for the generations of the future.”

A strong sense of stewardship for the land comes with being a Sakuma.

“We’ve always looked at it that (the land) wasn’t ours to sell,” said Steve. “Our parents created it and gave it to us.”