Nov 5, 2007

Chicago Markets Drive Profitability at K&K Farms

Farmers must consider themselves fortunate when they see long lines of cars caught in snarled traffic on television – even around relatively small urban areas. Thank heavens they don’t have to commute to work!

But commuting by another name might be called marketing.

At K & K Farms near Coloma, Mich., the production from 200 acres of fruit is arduously hauled, in a box on an extended cab dualie pickup truck, day by day to farmers’ markets in Chicago.

The trip takes about two hours each way, in freeway traffic that’s too fast for comfort – or maybe not moving at all. Linda Koenigshof gets up at 4 a.m. five days a week to drive produce to five markets in and around Chicago.

Fred Koenigshof is really happy his wife and family will do that work. For many years, Chicago has been a good market for the fruit and vegetable growers of southwest Michigan. But it used to be that most of the produce was taken there by wholesale buyers who came to the Benton Harbor Fruit Exchange or one of the other once-numerous exchanges to buy products to take to markets in Chicago.

In recent years, more farmers have been selling more directly as farmers’ markets have flourished, not just in Chicago but cities everywhere.

Fred, who will take over as president of the Michigan State Horticultural Society during the Great Lakes Fruit, Vegetable and Farm Market EXPO in December, hasn’t totally abandoned wholesale marketing. He’s on the board of the Watervliet Fruit Exchange, which has about 20 members. It has a packinghouse and offers both common cold storage and CA storage to members, and also sells crop inputs such as pesticides. The cooperative has an Autoline color sorter, used MCP last year for the first time and packs apples through the winter, mostly for sale in 3-pound bags. He also sells some fruit for processing.

But the farmers’ markets of Chicago, and direct retail sales to customers, have become much more important to K & K. Linda makes the trip, usually taking along her father, Gene Rennhick, 17-year-old daughter, Emily, and two other high school girls. They have to unload the truck, set up tents and tables and wait on customers. They get Sundays and Tuesdays off.

K & K Farms has a rich history. Fred’s mother was the daughter of Erich Kerlikowske, a prominent fruit grower who was president of the hort society in 1953, a Michigan State University Distinguished Service Award winner in 1957, third president of the National Peach Council and an associate of Stanley Johnston, the MSU breeder who bred the Haven series of peaches.

Fred’s father, Richard, was a hog, grain and potato farmer before he married Erich Kerlikowske’s daughter, Marion, but he went into partnership with her father and the farm was renamed K & K in honor of the Kerlikowske-Koenigshof combination. Fred and Linda have been in sole charge of the operation for more than 20 years.

They have three children. The eldest, Erich, 26, owns and drives a truck and helps on the farm sometimes. Amy, 24, has a degree in veterinary medicine from MSU. Emily, in high school, works with her mom marketing fruit.

The farm is labor-intensive, especially for harvest but for pruning as well.

“About 35 people live on the farm (migrant workers during the season) and another 10 to 15 drive in,” Fred said.

There are three big crops and several smaller crops.

Red raspberries take up 40 acres and blackberries another 10. They are planted in slightly raised beds with trickle irrigation and on trellises. A combination of floricane and primocane varieties provide a continuous flow of fruit from June to frost. The floricanes take the most work, since canes that fruited must be removed after the last harvest every year.

Peaches, the fruit that made the farm famous, are still a workhorse crop at 50 acres. The many varieties, mostly the Flamin’ Fury and Stellar series bred by neighbors Paul Friday and Randy and Annette Bjorge, provide a long marketing season that fits the farmers’ market scene.

He favors the Flamin’ Furys because they are redder, and people like red peaches. But the Stellar variety Autumn Star has done very well.

“It’s a late one, and we do well with late peaches,” Fred said. “Once you get past Redhavens, a lot of growers want to get into apples, and late peaches interfere with apples.”

But a good, late peach fits the farmers’ markets.

The third big crop is apples, 60 acres.

His newer plantings are heavy to Gala, Honeycrisp and early Fuji, planted on a 2- by 13-foot spacing on Bud 9 rootstock, supported by posts and four-wire trellis. “Diameter rules” pruning is the winter project. Despite the bitterpit and cracks, Honeycrisp is “our No. 1 seller in Chicago, by far,” he said.

Some of his orchards are 30 years old, and these are still dominated by Jonathans, Ida Reds and Romes. These apples go to Coloma Frozen Foods, a cooperative that claims Fred as a board member; to Knouse Foods, another cooperative fruit processor; or to AgriLink. While fresh market is the best market, not all apples make that grade.

“This year, we had spring frosts and a lot of our apples are not suited for fresh market,” he said.

So sort-outs, straight-run lots with high levels of off-grade apples and some older varieties find their homes with these processors.

Other crops on the farm include 10 acres of pears, 3 acres of Stanley plums and 30 acres of pumpkins.

Fred, now 51, has found himself more involved in industry and community leadership affairs over the last 10 years. He’s treasurer of the Michigan Association of Conservation Districts, on the local planning commission, chairs the zoning appeals board and is on the board of MACMA, the Michigan Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Association that plays a big role in marketing Michigan processing apples. He’s active in the Michigan Peach Sponsors, an organization that supports peach breeding and promotion in Michigan.

As a board member of the hort society, he gets involved in everything from scholarship programs to examining the research agenda and funding research projects at MSU. This year, he chaired the committee that does the annual planning for the Great Lakes Fruit, Vegetable and Farm Market EXPO.

The society also does some lobbying. The big issue in the last year has been seasonal farm labor and immigration.

“We’re trying to get a decent immigration reform bill passed,” Koenigshof said. “Allyn Anthony (executive director of the hort society) has been to Washington several times on this issue.

“We need a legal workforce in the U.S. that will work in our fruit and vegetable industries. Without it, horticulture is done in Michigan.”

That’s not part of his plan for the future of K & K Farms.