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Totally Determined Fruit Growers will Survive

Innovative fruit industry veteran maintains that there’s an upside to being broke

By René Featherstone Western Correspondent
The down slide of apple fortunes lately is “hands down, the worst” that orchardist Ray Colbert has seen in the half a century he’s been a player in Washington’s fruit industry. And yet, as he converses in his office at the Regal Fruit Co-op, Tonasket – “I was hired for three months to manage the business through the shut-down process until Regal ceases to exist on Aug. 1; it’s a sad challenge” –, the timbre of his talk is marked by élan. At 68, “I can’t see myself golfing and fishing.” There’s an upside to broke, he says, just as there’s a downside to success. “Our problem here in the Okanogan has been that we were too successful. Success makes you too slow to change. Of course, no one wants to have difficult times come, but it’s during difficult times that change happens. I really believe in change. In the past, those who were the most successful had the most difficulty making changes.” Colbert speaks from experience. He’s recognized throughout the industry for his business acumen and innovative approaches, yet some of his various enterprises yo-yoed through several ups and downs. “I’ve been right down to the bottom of the trench,” he puts it. “Yes, it’s humiliating to go broke, but you can’t give up. I’ve seen people walk away from their orchards, and if they’d just hung in there one more year, things would have turned around for them. “I’ve been desperate, I guess you could say, a number of times. What I learned is that you have to be able to go with the flow. It’s no use worrying about yesterday. There is going to be a fruit industry in this state.” He has no formula for changing what he perceives as one of the worst of Washington’s fruit growing trends. “You can see it at every meeting, there’s only a sprinkling of young growers who’re really determined, the rest is us gray hairs – I think that’s handicapping us as an industry.” In his own youth there was opportunity galore, he says. “I got in right at the tail of what I call the Old Era – big trees, and those old wooden boxes.” Growing up he worked in the “little orchard that Dad had in the Depression days. My brother Don and I drug (sprayer) hoses through the tall weeds, and so on. I remember spraying nicotine-sulfate on pears, and on each other. At that time I didn’t like apple farming, it was a kind of punishment.” Getting around to liking orcharding was “a slow process” for Colbert. “I worked my way through high school in a meat market. I knew a gentleman by the name of Bill Byrd, he was a strong Seventh Day Adventist and when the church sent him elsewhere, he talked me into buying his five acres of orchard north of town. He was asking $5,000, with only $250 down. My Dad was against me buying the orchard, he didn’t trust the orchard business.” The year was 1952. “That was a good year, I actually made $2,500 off the orchard.” Then he sold the place and, with the help from his father, “bought a new place of 18 acres in 1953. That had a beautiful home on it.” Colbert recalls 1956 as “a great year,” and 1957 as “awful.” He stuck with orcharding, although, business expansion at that time and into the early 1970s “frightened” growers in general. “Labor was very, very short. We hired kids, and some Native American folks, but we still had to tour the ‘jungle’ (by the railroad tracks), find winos, and sober them up so they’d work for a day or two.” Even back then it was business first for Colbert. “I enjoy both, being independent as a grower, and, having a challenging job working for someone else.” The post office employed him for a year, and then he worked for a construction company. In 1962 he opened the local office for H.R. Spinner Company, the farm supply business that since has become Wilbur Ellis. “That was a great job, I worked with a bunch of great people. I left there in 1970 – the 1970s were all good years for the orchards.” Industry expansion became possible with the influx of Hispanic workers. Before long there was an oversupply of labor – “they’re good workers, and nice people” –, but, “lots of labor let us plant too many trees. It’s crazy how much expansion happened.” Colbert believes that the apple acreage increase in the past three decades was too rapid and ultimately caused the economy slump in the apple industry. “We’re drowning in supplies. We could fight off the competition and deal with the retailers if we got back to (an annual production of) 50 to 60 million boxes,” he postulates, admitting that he himself contributed to the oversupply: “I did my share,” building his fruit acreage up to over 700 acres. Since 1974, he’s sat on the board of Tree Top; one way to balance apple supply and demand is to divert a higher percentage of the fresh fruit to processing, he suggests. The 1980s were rough times for growers, he says. It was the era of limited partnerships, an open door for schemers who, in some cases, managed to bilk folks out of their investments. “I learned some difficult lessons in those scary times,” Colbert remarks. His involvement in a shady limited partnership firm ended up “destroying me financially;” in 1986 he had to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But, “I reorganized out of that, and then the early 1990s were good years again.” During that period Colbert also managed the Chief Tonasket warehouse for 3 1/2 years. Today his orchard production comprises about 350 acres; much of the orchard management is his son Tom’s task, he says. “It’s mostly young orchard, we’ve got young pears, mostly Bosc, and young Galas and Granny Smiths.” His orchard renewals – costly to undertake at a time when returns are poor – have him hoping for a “fairly decent year next year.” He believes that such optimistic projection is justified, in part due to government support such as the two insurance programs that went into effect last fall, one insuring the crop, the other “putting a floor under the whole (market) thing.” However, Colbert emphasizes that he’s not a friend of government help in the long run. “Nobody has ever built a profitable industry on subsidies.” The statewide marketing co-op effort Colbert views with skepticism. “I feel a little pessimistic about the results of these efforts, although, the co-op effort got a little further this time than the same kind of effort in the 1980s.” Ultimately, he believes, orchardist survival is a matter of individual growers’ gumption. We’re in a stressful period right now, he concedes. “It can be especially stressful for an orchardist’s wife; and it’s hard on a person, too, to find out that some of his good buddies were buddies only when times were good.” But, “if you’re a person who’s totally determined to stick it out, people will do business with you. I still think that some really good money can be made, ahead.”