Skagit Valley cucumber growers in a pickle without Portland processing plant

Published 11:10 pm Wednesday, April 2, 2008

MOUNT VERNON — Cucumber growers are in a pickle with the impending closure of a processing plant in Portland, Ore., and a decision by the owner to stop buying pickle cukes in the Pacific Northwest.

Starting this year, pickles made by Bay Valley Foods of Green Bay, Wis., the nation’s largest pickle and pepper supplier and a division of TreeHouse Foods Inc. of Westchester, Ill., will come from other parts of the U.S. and as far away as India, company officials said.

India has been a small source of cukes for some time, said Ron Bottrell, a Bay Valley Foods spokesman.

Many of Bay Valley’s pickles are sold under the Nalley, Farman’s and Steinfeld’s labels, which bear slogans touting their origins as the “Down home taste of the Northwest since 1918,” “Delicious taste of the Northwest since 1944” and “Quality brand of the Northwest since 1922,” respectively.

Last year, TreeHouse reported that pickles, including the Heifetz and Peter Piper’s labels, accounted for 28.5 percent of its nearly $1.2 billion in net sales.

The plant in Portland will be closed in June, a month before harvesting begins, because the operation is no longer economical, Bottrell said.

With that move “they decided they could get cucumbers cheaper elsewhere,” said Don Kruse of La Conner, a farmer who estimates he will lose half of his gross annual income — a few hundred thousand dollars.

Farmers in the Skagit Valley, 50 miles north of Seattle, were told of the decision in February. They said the loss to the area’s economy amounts to millions of dollars and probably will displace hundreds of migrant workers.

“For every acre it takes about one worker and last year we had 1,000 hand-picked acres, so 1,000 seasonal workers technically are out of a job,” said Mike Youngquist, a fourth-generation Mount Vernon farmer whose great-grandfather homesteaded in the area in the 1890s. “These are poor people who don’t have a lot of skills other than being energetic and hard workers. They are the losers in this thing.”

Bay Valley is pulling out with two years remaining in a 10-year agreement after negotiating a settlement with ProFac, a cooperative that represents all 14 affected farmers in the Skagit Valley and four in Woodburn, Ore.

Skagit County Commissioner Ken Dahlstedt, a grower and negotiator for the farmers, said they could receive more than $1 million, but gross sales for the coming year had been estimated at $5 million with harvest costs running as high as 60 percent of the gross.

“It’s a fair settlement, but the growers are still losing two years of delivery and the biggest damage is for this year,” Dahlstedt said. “I think the company is being fair, but we would prefer to grow the crop and we would be financially better off to grow the crop.”

He said some farmers plan to sell to Pleasant Valley Farms, southeast of La Conner, but that company is mostly a wholesaler and much smaller than Bay Valley.

For the most part, cucumber growers must decide what to grow next. About 70 crops are grown in the Skagit Valley, potatoes being the largest, but farmers often specialize and cucumber growing in the area dates back half a century.

“You can switch wives way easier than you can switch crops,” Youngquist said.