A boost for farmers: More seek locally grown fruits and vegetables

CHUCKEY, Tenn. – Carrying long wooden baskets, a team of 80 to 90 farm workers ran up and down a 22-acre field near Washington County’s southern tip as they picked strawberries on a mid-May afternoon.

“A good strawberry picker makes 10 to 12 bucks an hour,” Steve Scott, of Scott’s Farms, said while he watched his farm hands fill their baskets with the dark red fruit and load the berries on trucks. “It all depends on how hard they work.”

In the next few hours, those trucks would take their cargo to 35 area Food City grocery stores that buy Scott’s strawberries and sell the locally grown produce next to fruit grown in California and elsewhere.

Executives with the chain’s parent company, K-VA-T Food Stores, the corporate owner of Food City, claim that when they are in season, Scott’s strawberries and those grown by David Mann, a Scott County, Va., farmer, make up 8 to 10 percent of their total produce sales.

According to a 2009 survey by the Food Marketing Institute, people are buying locally grown fruits and vegetables because they think they’re fresher and taste better than their counterparts. The shoppers also told the institute, a trade organization that represents 1,500 food retailers and wholesalers, they buy locally grown items at grocery stores because they want to support the local economy and like knowing the source of their food.

“There is an interest in locally grown foods,” institute spokesman Bill Greer said in a phone interview from his organization’s Arlington, Va., office. Because of this interest, he said, “many, many supermarkets are emphasizing locally grown foods wherever they can and whenever they can.”

Knowing the farmer

Scott’s Farms can sell about 1,000 16-quart cases of strawberries each day through a network of 15 fruit stands it manages in Northeast Tennessee and the Food City grocery stores that have been buying the fruits and vegetables since 2002.

“This thing’s changed a lot over the years,” Steve Scott said, looking back on how the market has evolved since his father, the late Wayne Scott, started growing strawberries in 1953.

In the beginning, he said, people used to line up outside the farm’s front doors with wash basins and other large containers that they filled with strawberries used to can at home or for homemade strawberry preserves or jellies. But now, customers are buying their fruits and vegetables from grocery stores, even if they aren’t in season or ripe and fresh.

“We’re probably selling to more people at the stands and grocery stores” than we did in the past, Steve Scott said. “But those people aren’t buying as much as they used to.”

The farm gets about $44 for every 16-quart case of strawberries it sells at its stands. It gets slightly less when it sells to Food City at a price neither Scott nor the company’s executives would disclose.

Scott’s Farms spends about $30 to produce a single case of strawberries, Steve Scott said, with most going to pay the workers.

Most of these workers are in this country on a temporary H2A Visa, which allows people from other countries to stay in the United States and work the duration of a growing season. But about 20 of them live in the area – either because they were born here or because they’ve worked on the farm for so long they’ve settled here.

“Every single one of them was here last year,” Steve Scott said of his workers.

While he stands to make about $14 per case of strawberries, Steve Scott said he could not provide an accurate description of the money his crop brings in each year: “When I fill out a credit application and it says, ‘What’s your annual income?’ I fill out the box and say ‘Talk to me in December.’ ”

Food City bought 10,000 cases of Scott’s strawberries when the two businesses started working together eight years ago. It only bought 5,000 cases last year, when late spring rains damaged the crops. This year likely will be the exact opposite.

“There’s more out there earlier than I’ve ever seen,” Scott said, adding that the lack of a late spring frost and warm weather have caused his berries to thrive.

In anticipation of this year’s surplus, Food City has committed to buying 15,000 jars of strawberry preserves from Scott’s Farms.

“We’re going to do all that we can to sell his strawberries,” K-VA-T Produce Director Mike Tipton said in an interview at his Abingdon, Va., office.

Supporting the local economy

Last year, K-VA-T bought $5 million worth of fruits, vegetables and decorative plants from farmers in its service area, which stretches from Crossville, Tenn., to Pikeville, Ky., and Hillsville, Va.

“All of that money stays right here,” Tipton said. “We’re keeping the jobs here in our area, and the money here instead of taking it and sending it to California.”

Strawberries are the chain’s first locally grown produce of the year and hit its shelves right around Mother’s Day. They’re followed by beans, corn, tomatoes – which Tipton said are the store’s biggest crop – and everything else from summer squash to Halloween pumpkins and gourds.

“We want to have these items at our stores for the customer,” Tipton said. “It’s a competitive niche for us; it’s something that our customers want, and it’s something that we like to provide.”

The chain buys directly from 20 farmers in its coverage area. It also buys from Appalachian Harvest, a program managed by Appalachian Sustainable Development, which markets organic produce grown by local farmers.

“We have made experts,” said Keith Cox, a K-VA-T produce buyer who specializes in the company’s locally grown offerings. “They have become experts at [farming], and it’s as nice of a product as you’ve seen anywhere.”

Superior products, however, come at a cost, Tipton said. “We pay more for the local berries than we do for the California berries,” the produce director said, adding that while they spend more on their local items, the chain sells them at prices comparable to what comes from outside the region and what is sold at other stores.

K-VA-T works to counter the extra expense with an aggressive marketing campaign that features store banners highlighting the farmers. It also sends its produce section employees on farm tours so they can learn more about what they sell.

When selling the local items, the grocery chain also has to deal with concerns about shelf-life, Tipton said. Because they are picked when they are perfectly ripe, locally raised strawberries have to be sold within one day before they start to go bad. The California strawberries can sit on the shelves for as many as 10 days, Tipton said, because the fruit is picked at a time when it can be shipped long distances and still look appealing.

Food City addresses this problem by studying its sales records and giving its farmers specific orders so they can stagger planting their crops to get the maximum yield. The company also helps its farmers purchase equipment they may need to harvest or store the produce, Tipton said.

Three years ago, K-VA-T Food Stores worked with the Southwest Virginia Farmers Market to secure a $225,000 grant from the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission to build a pair of 40-foot-long hydrocoolers for its wholesale operations.

“We owe a lot to Food City,” market Manager Kevin Semones said. “They wrote some letters and made some phone calls.”

When the market finished building the coolers last summer, they were used to chill 43,000 boxes of locally grown sweet corn that was shipped to produce buyers in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. The market plans to ship about three times as much corn this year and also is on track to use the cooler to prepare 3,000 boxes of locally grown broccoli for shipment and sale. Food City is buying 1,000 of these boxes, Semones said.

“Carroll County broccoli will be a big hit this season,” Tipton said, adding that his company will feature this local item from mid-June through mid-October.

Freshness and taste

Cody Scott parked a silver pickup truck full of 54 cases of strawberries next to his father as he supervised the workers on their farm.

“This is Bonham Road, Abingdon, Marion, Chilhowie and Damascus,” Steve Scott said as he listed off the grocery stores his son would deliver to in a roughly 100-mile area in the Mountain Empire.

The farmer took a second look at his clipboard and told his son to put another 14 cases in his truck. These strawberries were bound for the Food City in Blountville, Tenn.

After making this last-minute stop, Cody Scott’s pickup truck pulled in front of the Bonham Road Food City at Exit 7 in Bristol, Va.

Produce Manager Steve Brown was waiting outside to meet him.

“I’ll go through these in a day,” Brown said as he loaded 14 crates of strawberries onto a metal cart and pushed it through the building’s front door. “I sell more of these than anything, and they look better and better with every shipment.”

One customer muttered “good timing” when he saw Brown’s cart and followed it to the produce section. This didn’t surprise the produce manager, who gets calls from people wanting to know when the Scott’s truck is coming.

Before Brown could finish setting up his display, Louise Johnson grabbed two cartons that the Bristol, Va., resident planned to take home for dessert.

“They’re sweeter and just of a better taste,” she said when asked why she prefers the locally raised strawberries over their California counterparts. “They’re like the strawberries we used to get when we were growing up, and that was a long time ago.”

Carly Thompson, a member of the Bristol Herald Courier’s reader advisory panel, also noticed a difference in taste when she tried Scott’s Farm strawberries in a taste test between the local strawberries and some grown in California.

She said the locally raised strawberries were juicier, softer and had a deeper color than the ones from California. That’s because the local fruit was picked when perfectly ripe, unlike the California berries, which are picked early so they can be packaged and shipped across the country.

“If you pick them like this, you can’t ship them and have them last as long,” Thompson said, adding that she appreciates the fruit’s ripeness because she is an avid gardener who has raised fruits and vegetables.

For this reason, Thompson said she tries to buy local produce. She also likes to support the local economy and likes the fact that the berries aren’t shipped great distances from farm to store, a process Thompson said consumes a lot of gas and fuel.

“We need to reduce the amount of trucks on the road,” said Thompson, who shares this reason for buying locally grown produce with 35 percent of the shoppers that Greer’s organization interviewed for its survey.

Evidence of a growing trend

According to the Food Marketing Institute’s survey, 82 percent of shoppers buy locally grown fruits and vegetables because they value the freshness; 75 percent said they want to support the local economy, 58 percent said it tastes better, and 51 percent said they liked knowing the source of their food.

Though it conducts a consumer trends survey every year, last year’s survey was the first time the trade organization asked questions about locally raised produce and the reasons people bought it. It started asking these questions, spokesman Greer said, because it was becoming “evident that selling these items was becoming a big trend, and we wanted to drill down on it a little more.”

Greer said his organization has yet to count the stores that feature locally raised produce, but noted Walmart touts the practice.

“Locally grown allows us to provide our customers with the freshest produce while reducing our carbon footprint and supporting both the local economy and the country’s farming heritage,” Walmart spokeswoman Caren Epstein said in an e-mail from her company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. Walmart has always sold these items, she said, but ramped up efforts in 2005.

But Walmart’s definition of locally grown produce might not match the picture its customers get when they think “local.” While two or three farms in Crossville and Hillsville were on a list of locally grown produce vendors Epstein provided, most of its suppliers were from West Tennessee or Southeast Virginia.

Consumers also have different opinions when they use this term, according to Greer’s survey: 30 percent said produce can be marketed as “locally grown” if it’s from their home state; 51 percent said the term is limited to food that’s traveled less than 50 miles, while 44 percent said it can travel more than 76 miles and still be considered local.

“Some people’s definition of locally grown is the whole Southeast,” Tipton said.

When Food City uses the term “locally grown,” the company’s produce director said, it applies only to the region that’s served by its grocery stores.

But while the definitions of “locally grown” may vary from place to place, the produce director also said he knows the trend is rapidly spreading across his industry.

“It’s huge,” Tipton said, pointing to a stack of trade magazines with cover stories about the market for locally grown produce. “And it’s here to stay.”

Homegrown or imported: A strawberry taste test

Two members of the Bristol Herald Courier’s reader advisory panel, just by looking at them, could tell the difference between a plate of fresh-cut Scott’s Farms strawberries and a plate of berries that came from California. Here are a few observations from a taste test in which they preferred the locally raised fruits over their counterparts.

 “I don’t know if they’re riper, but those over here on the left are better than the ones on the right. They’re definitely sweeter,” said Jack Aaron, a retired Air Force major. The locally grown berries were on the left.

 “This is sweet, juicy and sweet,” Tekai Shu said as he bit into the locally grown berries. “This one’s going to be hard and I know this. ... Yep, I was right.”

WHY BUY LOCAL?
Seventy-two percent of the grocery store shoppers surveyed by the Food Marketing Institute said they prefer locally grown fruits and vegetables over produce that’s been shipped across the country. Here are a few reasons why, according to the institute’s 2009 U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends survey.

Reason for buying locally grown produce and percentage of shoppers who listed it:

Freshness: 82
They want to support the local economy: 75
Taste: 58
They like knowing the source of the product: 51
Prices: 38
Greater nutritional value: 36
Better for the environment: 35
Appearance: 28

gmclean@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2518