A Peach Grower Comes Home Thanking His Lucky Stars
After a winter among California's smudge pots, Kennewick orchardist D. E. Stull decides a frozen navel orange crop is a worse fate than anything Horse Heaven can throw at him.
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That the Kennewick peach growers don't know hard luck when they meet it is the opinion of D. E. Stull, who returned the last of the week from southern California, where he went to work through the orange harvest. Before removing the peach fillers from his orchard, Mr. Stull spent a good many nights among the smudge pots and knows how it feels to see a crop nipped in the bud, but it was a new experience to see a crop turned into a total loss after it had matured and was ready for the picker.
This is what happened to the orange groves in California where Mr. Stull was working. A drop of the thermometer to 21 degrees for six hours one night played havoc with the largest navel orange crop California has ever grown. Not only did the freeze spell ruin to many of the growers, but it threw thousands of pickers and packers out of employment.
"The California orange growers, or at least the small growers, are all broke and have been broke almost from the time they planted their groves," said Mr. Stull. "I have a smudging outfit which I no longer need and I talked to several of the growers in the hope that I might sell it. Invariably I met with the same story. They needed the outfit, the price was satisfactory, but they didn't have the money. I suggested to one grower that if he really needed the outfit he could surely negotiate a loan at his bank. He replied that he already owed the bank more than he could ever repay. The same, he said, was true of every orange grower in California excepting the large companies who operate on a large scale and can stand a small margin of profit. You bet, a Kennewick peach tree looks a whole lot better to me than it did a few weeks ago."
“You bet, a Kennewick peach tree looks a whole lot better to me than it did a few weeks ago.”
A single cold night in 1916 wiped out California's biggest navel crop, bankrupted small growers and idled thousands of pickers — a reminder that farm economies are one weather event deep. Kennewick was built on the same gamble: irrigated orchards that could be ruined before the fruit left the branch. Yakima Valley growers still watch the spring forecast the way Stull watched his smudge pots, and thinning margins still push the smallest operations toward the bank.
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