Nov 6, 2008

Young Grower Rising Star in Michigan’s Horticulture Industry

Jason Fleming has risen toward the top in a hurry.

He just turned 31 in September, but he will take office as president of the Michigan State Horticultural Society (MSHS) at the end of the Great Lakes Fruit, Vegetable and Farm Market EXPO in Grand Rapids in December.

His goal: “I just don’t want to screw it up.”

He truly believes becoming the president so young is an honor and a privilege, something he will greatly benefit from. Being on the board, rubbing shoulders with leading growers who have many more years of experience than he has will give him connections that will last a lifetime.

Being able to call someone and ask for advice or being invited to look at a successful grower’s orchard will be of lifelong value, he said. He hopes that others will benefit from his being in the office, because he’s sure he will.

Jason is amiable and articulate, traits that should be useful as MSHS starts a capital formation campaign this fall. The idea is to enlarge a pool of money – already about a million dollars – that will be used to fund research.

Jason believes that having money to back specific research projects allows growers to be “a bigger factor directing their industry.”

Jason grew up with a connection to N.J. Fox and Sons, a large family operation that has more than 1,000 acres in orchards, plus packing lines, storages and a trucking business. His mother, Ruth, was a Fox, the daughter of Ralph Fox, who is 87 and still active around the farm. Ruth married Sam Fleming, who has a small fruit farm in west central Michigan at Shelby, about 10 miles inland from Lake Michigan.

The land around Shelby is droughty and rolling, with lots of high fruit sites and temperatures moderated by the big lake.

As a boy, Jason worked for the Fox operation.

“I started in high school working as a grunt laborer, trying to save money for college,” he said.

At Grand Valley State University, he majored in geology with the intention of becoming a high school teacher. But as he began to gather experience student teaching, something changed.

“I found I didn’t like teaching all that much,” he said. “College wasn’t hard. I got good grades and I enjoyed learning new stuff – and it was a good place to be in the winter. But I really missed being outside and working on the farm.”

So in 2000, he left college. Bruce Fox offered him a full-time job and he took it.

His big legacy from college is his wife. He met Heidi at Grand Valley, and she is now a second-grade teacher in the Pentwater school system. They have no children.

Jason took to his new job. In 2001, N.J. Fox and Sons bought Dan Aebig’s fruit farm, and the company offered him the position managing Aebig Apple, a 300-acre operation that includes storages and a packing shed and a brand name under which fresh fruits and vegetables are sent into the wholesale market. He’s gradually gaining an ownership position in the company.

N.J. Fox and Sons began business about the time of World War II. When N.J.’s sons Ralph, Roy and Floyd returned after the war, the family built a business that today includes a number of cousins, now including Jason, a great-grandson of N.J. The business also includes a tart cherry pitting and packing operation and operates a warehouse in Shelby that is a receiving station for Gerber Products, Coloma Frozen Foods and Pro-Fac Cooperative. Fox also grows asparagus.

While Aebig is mostly apples, and Jason is mostly Aebig, the whole Fox enterprise is held together by projects that connect everyone, especially at harvest.

“We all work together,” Jason said. “Tart cherries take up about three weeks of everybody’s time.”

Historically, the area around Shelby is tart cherry country, and tart cherries are the first major fruit of the season, coming off in July. Fruit is shaken from the trees onto inclined-plane catching frames and conveyed into tanks of water for cooling, pitting and packing into 30-pound pails for freezing.

They also grow pears, mostly for delivery to Gerber. Pears – Bartlett and some Clapps -– come off in September. Because these go for baby food, Gerber is extremely careful to avoid pesticide residues and possible contamination. No drops can be harvested, preharvest spray intervals must be closely watched, and Gerber wants no nuts grown nearby because of concerns about food allergies.

In 2002, Jason went to New York on an International Fruit Tree Association (IFTA) tour, where he saw tall spindle orchards developed by Terence Robinson and his colleagues at Cornell University.

“I started doing that immediately,” Jason said.

Back on the farm, he planted the early September Wonder Fuji and Honeycrisp on a 3-foot by 12-foot spacing on Bud 9 rootstock tied to a three-wire trellis. He uses renewal pruning.

The lower-vigor Honeycrisp have done well on this system, he said, but the more vigorous Fuji “got big and look a little wild.”

Still, the direction is set. The old trees from the ’70s have been pushed out and new plantings are being made. They grow lots of varieties. Besides Fuji and Honeycrisp, they grow Jonathans, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, McIntosh (the LindaMac strain), Gala, Empire and others. Apples go into CA storage for packing for fresh market. Those that don’t make the top grade go to Peterson Farms or Gerber for juice. Some Empires are sold to Peterson’s and make it into packages as fresh apple slices.

Some fruit for long-term storage is treated with 1-MCP. Jason is impressed with the resulting fruit quality.
“We won’t be doing that this year because of the short crop,” Jason said.

Like many Michigan growers, he suffered early season freezes that took most of the Red Delicious crop. While he had no hail damage – unlike growers on the Ridge 50 miles south – his crop was shortened by the cold spring and the June drop that cut the overall Michigan crop size to about 60 percent of normal.

About 60 percent of Michigan’s crop has historically gone for processing, but the reward for fresh market fruit has led more growers to shift that direction if they can. Besides having their own brand, N.J. Fox and Sons packs some fruit for sale by others with market access – like BelleHarvest Sales at Belding.

Last winter, Jason and Bruce Fox went on the IFTA tour of California’s Central Valley. It was a real awakening for Jason, seeing the wall-to-wall irrigated agriculture and the mixture of fruit, nuts, vegetables and dairy farms. The stone fruit industry impressed him, and he’s now considering growing sweet cherries in high tunnels.

While tunnels are expensive, the return from high-value sweet cherries protected from rain-cracking and associated disease may be worth the investment, he said.

“I would love to do it,” he said. “I saw sweet cherries under tunnels at the Southwest Michigan Research and Extension Center this year, and that looked good.”

This year, June rain “killed us,” he said, cracking a nice-looking crop of sweet cherries and reducing their value to nothing.

“It’s just a big waste,” he said. “We lost them all.”

There’ll be lots of choices like that, and lots of years to make them. Jason is pleased he’s been accepted at such a young age into an industry that is blossoming with new ideas.

The future’s looking good.