Hispanics Find Time Is Ripe -- Chances To Own Orchards, Farms Are Increasing

YAKIMA - Million-dollar fruit warehouses dot the Yakima Valley's landscape, but there is room for more pioneers willing to bet their future on the precarious apple market.

Under construction in the Naches Heights area is the second Hispanic-owned fruit warehouse in the world's premier apple-growing region, where generations of Hispanics earned a seasonal living in the fields.

Now some of those Hispanics are running orchards, and others are buying farms and building warehouses. They say white migrants in Yakima made the same evolution from field to foreman to owner.

"Some awfully good growers came out of the dust-bowl country. They evolved to owners. That's where I see the Mexicans," said Pete Garza, a Yakima fruit grower whose family migrated to Granger in the 1940s.

Garza later apprenticed in construction and became a successful contractor. Then he bought 100 acres of orchards and, in 1987, a packing house in Moxee.

"I always felt I wanted to be an apple grower," Garza said. "I always felt I had something to offer. That was a mountain out there; could I actually climb it without being a mountain climber?"

While Garza built up his organic apple business, Rene and Carmen Garcia were reviving a run-down, 20-acre orchard in the Naches Heights area.

The couple's G & G Orchards has since blossomed into a thriving operation with more than 200 acres of apples and pears, storage buildings and a $700,000 annual budget.

When its new packing and storage warehouse is done this winter, G & G will have grown from a small operator into a medium-sized fruit company.

Rene Garcia, 42, the son of a migrant farm worker, said a little luck and a lot of hard work are behind G & G's success.

"It takes family to do anything like that. Even our kids, they all pitch in," he said. "I've learned by getting burned, by experience, by doing things wrong. And then you do it right."

The Garcias' venture began in 1972 when Merced Garcia's boss retired and offered to sell him a small orchard. Rene quit a logging job to help his dad and soon bought his own orchard.

"He started out with almost nothing," Garcia said of his father. "He just worked seven days a week, and so did I. I like to work. Instead of goofing off, I worked weekends to save that dollar to get ahead."

That work is slowly paying off for the Garcias, whose current production could triple when most of their trees mature in seven to eight years.

"We had some good years and we just started buying more orchards," Rene Garcia said.

Last year the company produced about 5,000 bins of apples - at 800 to 1,000 pounds per bin - up from 250 to 300 bins in G & G's early years. Last year's production has been sold with G & G's Great Nature label nationwide and in London.

Garcia held most of his fruit until after July 4, gambling that he could sell when prices were high. G & G's Red Delicious packed 88 to a box were selling for $20 to $22 per box last week, up from $12 to $14 earlier in the season.

Gambling is part of the business, but the Garcias have moved ahead by producing consistently high-quality fruit, said Lorne Johnston, their broker at United Fresh Marketing in Yakima.

The Garcias' quality apples stand out in Keith Mathews' recollections of his days as a fruit salesman. He described the Garcias' success as "a real neat American story . . ."

Mathews, now secretary-manager of the Yakima Valley Growers-Shippers Association, said the industry is ripe for other Hispanics to move into management and ownership positions. He said they are advancing because of their experience and language skills and because some fruit company owners are retiring without heirs.

G & G's growth comes at a challenging time in the apple industry. Big companies are getting larger, production is increasing, and some predict a shakeout soon.

But Johnston says there will always be room in the industry for high-quality producers like G & G. "When they pack the quality of fruit (they do), nobody ever questions whether there's room for them in the marketplace."