Utah Valley Orchards

Transcription

1 Utah Valley Orchards Interviewee: Tim Crandall (TC) 749 East Center, Orem, Utah Interviewer: Emily West (EW) Interview location: 749 East Center, Orem, Utah Date: Summer 2000 Overview: 1. He teaches school as his primary income 2. People who help with the harvest 3. Crandall farm history 4. Fruit stand history 5. Distribution through Dan s Foods 6. Operating the fruit stand 7. E coli and pasteurization issues of the juice 8. Types of apples 9. Types of cherries 10. Mexican labor, from its beginnings with them 11. Feelings working on the farm as a kid 12. Dan s again 13. Sorting fruit 14. Working as a kid 15. Other supplemental crops 16. Why he is continuing the orchard legacy 17. They re building a new fruit stand 18. Value of work 19. Variety and different jobs from orcharding 20. Social interactions from orcharding 21. Size of the Crandall farm through time 22. Working to preserve the farm 23. The 70 s, the mall 24. It was Merrill who first decided not to sell when others were 25. Greenhouse 26. Fruit growers board of directors 27. The best part is pleasing people 28. Family interaction, he s never fought with his dad 29. Mexicans again 30. What s currently being grown on the farm 31. Not moving to Santaquin has been profitable 32. Water rights is pretty much a non-issue EW: What do you do, because you don t farm for a living, do you? TC: I teach school. EW: That seems common for a farmer.

2 TC: It used to be very common, I mean even more so than now, because people couldn t make a living farming. They had a farm and then taught school. I teach school at Hillcrest. It s a good combination. EW: It gives you the summers off to do your farm work, doesn t it? TC: I m off all June, July, and most of August. EW: You have the time you need. TC: Right. Except for harvest time. Harvest time begins as you go back to school. But we have a lot of help at harvest time. EW: Where do you get that help? TC: We have two brothers who work for us. They both have other jobs at the Provo Canyon Boys School. One of them is a custodian at night and he works during the day. His brother mows lawns, and helps us when we really need it. He usually takes a week off during harvest time. The other guy comes and works every day. Then they usually find one or two guys. For thirty years, we had the same guy. We try to pay them enough that it s worth while. It works out well. EW: Now your dad has had that land forever. TC: Yes. His grandfather, Charles Crandall, had 160 acres of land. In fact this was my grandfather s. Then there was ten acres that my dad bought, then five acres. As you go up the road you ll see it. My dad bought five acres where their house is, and the relative bought a couple of acres. When my mom and dad had enough money they bought five more acres. So that s our farm on this side. The property on the other side of Center Street was divided into thirds. We have about two and a half acres. We bought some from my aunt. This is a Centennial Farm. EW: Did you grow up in that house that your dad s in right now? TC: We grew up in the house on the corner. Center Street used to end at 8 th East, so the lane back in was to our sheds and my dad s goat box. We grew up on the corner, but there wasn t a street right there. When they took the road through, around 1978, then my mom and dad said, We don t want to live this close to the street, so they moved. They built a house back in the field. Then my sister, who hadn t been married long and had a couple of kids, moved there. She helps us a lot. In fact for a long time she about ran the fruit stand. She still helps us a lot. EW: Do you still have that fruit stand? TC: We re remodeling it, we ll see what it turns out like. Yes, in fact she still helps us, and my dad has always helped with the fruit stand, but he s, you know My sister s been there a lot. EW: How long has the fruit stand been there? Crandall, Tim 2

3 TC: When they put Center Street through my dad said one of two things can happen: either we can be really mad about it, because when they condemn something; especially farmland, they don t give you anything for it. He said we can either be very bitter about it and there have been a couple of farmers who that had happened to or, he said, we can make the best of the situation. That s what they decided to do. We had sold fruit for a long, long time on the front lawn. We didn t sell much because everybody had their own farms. But when they put Center Street through we built our fruit stand, probably in EW: Your dad has about thirteen acres? TC: Yes. EW: What does he grow? TC: Pears and apples mostly, a few peaches and a few cherries. Of those pears is our best crop. People don t use near as many of them, but there s not many pears grown. I don t know. There s about 150 acres of pears in Utah county. Compared to apples it s good. It s easy to get rid of. People want them, and even though not nearly as many people use pears, they re good. EW: Your uncle John, says that he thinks your father is one of the few people who manages to make a living off of the farm through his fruit stand. Did your dad work outside of the farm? TC: He drove a school bus, but that s it, and he s done very well. We have not sold any of our ground. The city s taken some for Center Street, and they ve also taken some to widen 800 East a little bit. He s done very well. In fact we were talking about it today. Not long after he married, he went down and helped build Geneva Steel. He had a chance to have what would have developed into a good job, but he said no, he couldn t do it. We ve also been very lucky. We ve sold for the past thirty years to Dan s Foods in Salt Lake. EW: And you re still selling to them? TC: Associated is buying them, so we will see what happens. During the last five or six years we ve sold to a produce house that was owned by the same family. They have sold theirs to Muir Roberts. They all say, Oh it won t make any difference, but we ll see. It s probably not quite as critical now as it would have been ten years ago because of our fruit stand. EW: Do you have regulars that come back all of the time? TC: We have. It s incredible. We also sell apple juice and that has been a real plus, because instead of selling juice apples for ten or twenty dollars a bin, a dollar to a bushel, you sell juice. It s work to make juice, but you sell them for $120 a bin. It helps a lot. Plus it brings people in. We stay open till Christmas, sometime past. But that s when we like to be finished, Christmas. EW: When does the fruit stand open? Crandall, Tim 3

4 TC: We have peaches and pears and we ll start when pears come off around August 20 th, the end of August. Then we stay open all the time from then until December. And sometimes we have to stay open longer. I mean we do stay open longer because it s so hard to sell apples so cheap when you know that if you stay there a little longer you can sell them. But December is when we like to be finished; that s our goal line. EW: Your apple juice is a draw for people? TC: It is. It s been a little tough. A couple of years ago they had this Ecoli scare. We spent a lot of time looking into it to see if this was really safe, because we obviously don t want to sell something that isn t safe. What we found out was that the people who had problems with Ecoli were the ones who let their cows graze in their orchards. Then they would go in and pick up the apples off the ground and make juice out of them. Because of that everybody gets a bad name. We put a label on it that says it s not pasteurized. We don t want to sell it to people if they re concerned. We ve looked into pasteurizing it, but I think that as soon as we do that the novelty is gone. EW: Exactly. You can buy pasteurized stuff in grocery stores. TC: That s right, and it tastes a little different, but some people like it fresh, and some people like to have it sit there a week. It hurt last year when we didn t have enough apples to make juice. The first year we sold it, for a long time we couldn t stay in juice. Then a couple of years ago, with the Ecoli scare, it dropped off. EW: You think you ll have enough apples for juice this year? TC: Oh yes, we ve got tons of apples. We use good apples, and people come and say, How come this juice is so good? Most people put rotten apples in. We use good apples. Of course our farm is small enough that a lot of people throw away more than we raise here. Yes, apple juice is a big draw, especially from about Halloween to about the second week of December. We sell quite a few gift boxes at Christmas time. We package them in two or three different things for Christmas presents. EW: And that does pretty well for you? TC: It does, especially for businesses and schools to give to their employees. We use some flat boxes that we sell for about $5.50, and it has a layer of packed apples. So it s a good deal for us. It s also a nice present for $5.50, because you buy $5.50 worth of chocolates and you don t have much, it s a tiny box. We have people who say it s different because it s healthy. EW: What kind of apples do you raise? TC: Red and gold delicious, Jonathans and a few Romes. We re going to plant a couple of new varieties. We know the newer types, but we re waiting to see what shakes out, because some of them are come and gone before you could ever get an inspection. We think we know what kind we want now. Crandall, Tim 4

5 EW: And what about cherries? What kind do you do have: sweet cherries or tart cherries? TC: We don t have any tart cherries, because wholesale for us doesn t work very well. We would have to get more out of things. So we have sweet cherries, but we don t plant any new sweet cherry trees. It takes so long to come on. EW: The pear trees grow faster? TC: Yes. Well, apple trees are what we plant a lot of. EW: They come along pretty fast? TC: Yes, and then they re good. Of course everybody in the world has decided that apples are the thing to grow too, so I don t know. Until two years ago when there were so many, we always sold our apples. We sell also to some community down in Colorado City, and they buy stuff as a group of people. We started out selling them pears and now we sell both, and they always buy second grade or little pears. We sell a lot to them. EW: I want to talk a little but about the labor that s worked on your farm. You mentioned the one illegal alien who came through every year; did he bring other people with him when he came? TC: No. He was very much to himself, and one reason that he liked working for us was that other than right during harvest time he could do all of our work EW: Do you pay for the work that you get there? TC: Oh, we try to, yes. We don t know because there are not too many people to compare it to, and we re kind of an only-show-in-town kind of thing, except for Jack Stratton up here. EW: What was it like growing up on the farm? Was it lots of work? TC: It was. It was fun though. I mean I enjoyed it, and it was kind of what we hope it is for our kids. You re not out a hundred miles away from anyone, so we had kids to play with, but yet I guess probably the most important thing was that what we did was meaningful. We hope that s what we do for our kids, you know, rather than have them go sweep the gutter. I would come home and work every night after school. EW: Did you have much time for extracurricular school activities? TC: As much as I wanted. We never go to BYU football games because that s our busy time, and it was that same way then. There were about two months that were pretty busy. I was never a football player, so it didn t make any difference, but as far as basketball, by the time that happened we were okay. We were really done by probably Thanksgiving. We had sold everything. What we sold to Dan s back then was almost everything, and our fruit stand was a nice little side thing. Now it s developed so that probably our fruit stand is our primary source, Crandall, Tim 5

6 and Dan s is our secondary source. Before they would have all our apples sold by October or November. I d come home and work [not understandable]. But it was nice. I liked it. It wasn t bad, and, you know, even then it wasn t huge enough that it was an overwhelming thing. Now we pick everything in bins, you know, and you set it up on the table; it runs out, and you set it back on the palette and put the palette on the truck. I remember driving a tractor for them when they would use baskets, and we had two or three trailers that they would put about thirty-something bushel baskets, on. You would go down the rows and then you have to go sort them at night. We ve always sorted at night because it was easier to get help. We d start 4:00 and go till eight or nine. It was fun. I drove a tractor while other kids were home watching TV. EW: How old were you when you started working in the orchard? TC: You mean for the first time? I was little. We go up and do pears when the children are pretty tiny. I ve worked probably from the time I was five or six. I was really little. EW: What was one of the first things that you were responsible for, driving the tractor? TC: That s the first thing I can remember. I don t know if it was the first thing I was responsible for, but it was more fun than a lot of things. There were things like picking up limbs after they were pruned. I remember throwing the limbs into the middle of rows. I learned pretty quickly, because that was a much better job than EW: Did you keep any animals too? TC: We didn t. When you talk to my dad he can tell you, but my mom and dad used to have a cow. I can barely remember it; I must ve been four or five.we used to go to a guy down in the River Bottoms who had a horse. So we still had the corral from when we would go down there. Probably from the time I was six until the time I was ten or eleven we d go. He had a Shetland pony that I would ride through the trails. I m the youngest by seven years, so by the time I came along it was pretty exclusively a fruit farm. Well, we used to grow a few cantaloupes. We had some ground that we leased. Now we wait for the trees to grow, but it used to be that they would plant raspberries or some crop that they could get some money from in between rows. So they could have some money coming in while the trees were growing up. It also took longer for the trees to grow. Now they have trees that are semi-dwarf and they produce much quicker than they used to. But I remember that down here there were raspberries. We leased a piece of property for a few years and planted cantaloupe. We used to take some up to Bountiful, and some pumpkins. EW: Did you ever get jack-o-lantern pumpkins? TC: We did, we did. In fact one of these years we re going to do that. Our only problem is by the time I get out of school we re usually behind. It takes a long time to finish up lots of paper work to finish up the school year, so we re usually a little behind when we start the summer, and by the time we get around to it I m afraid our pumpkins wouldn t be good until Christmas or something. Crandall, Tim 6

7 EW: Have you always been involved in the farm? TC: No I haven t. I mean through high school I helped in the fall, but I also worked. John had a taco place down here where the China Bowl is. He had a Taco Fiesta, so I worked there. They were very good jobs because in the fall I would work maybe Saturday nights only. I ve always helped on the farm, but during high school, you know how high school kids are. I did it because I didn t have much interest; I didn t think I d ever end up doing lots with it. I still helped. EW: And it s something that you really enjoy now. TC: Yes, I do. Obviously we could sell it, you would make more off the interest than you make farming in a year. But it s fun. If you have property, it s easy to sell and get the money. It s much more challenging to keep it going. You read in the paper all the time: Oh, we re selling because we don t make enough money to make it worthwhile, or whatever. It s Like the fruit stand that we re building now, we re making it about three or four times as big because it s a challenge and it s enjoyable. It s a good place for kids to be. My sister has six kids, some of them are older, one s married and one s going on a mission, but they come and help us too. That s another reason to keep it. We take pride keeping it anyhow. EW: What do you think you learned through growing up on the farm and from working in the orchard that you know your friends who stayed home watching TV missed out on? TC: Work, and the value of work, and the importance of getting it done. The year I graduated from high school we had a cherry orchard. It was my grandpa s. John s owns it now; it ran clear down through there. My dad said, If you find help and pick it, you can have what you make out of it. The guy in Salt Lake who we sold to at Dan s said, We really need cherries. My dad said, I don t want to do it. I said, I ll do it. We went down to the employment office and got some people to come and help. This must have been in I got some people to come and help. I thought, Well, this is a piece of cake. But they stole all the cherries that they picked; they took them END OF SIDE A TC: Yes. I also planted little patches of cantaloupe and things that we sold, and we leased a place where we had plum trees, and we take that fruit to fruit stands. One thing I like about farming a lot is that you don t do the same thing every day. I guess ours is small enough that I get to do different things every day. I don t spray sixty hours a week every week. I spray once a week or something like that. I learned a variety of different things, and we ve been to some interesting places. When I was a kid we went to some interesting places. We went to a guy who had fighting roosters and they used to bet on roosters. I remember he had a wallet that was huge. He d get in this closet, and he always paid us in cash. He had this wallet that only had 50 and 100 dollar bills. Every year or so he would overpay my dad and say, Here, you count it. My dad would always count it and find a mistake and give it back to him. He was an interesting guy. But there are a lot of experiences that you would never have. You get to know a lot of people. Crandall, Tim 7

8 EW: It s probably a good way to teach kids social interaction skills. TC: It is. In fact our oldest daughter goes up and helps, never alone, in the fruit stand. We think there are a lot of good things that could come from it. EW: It kind of makes me wish I d grown up on a farm. TC: Well most days that s what we think, although we do have those days when we ask, Why are we doing this? Of course, what job do you have that you don t do that? EW: Now your great-grandfather started with 160 acres and over the years it s been parceled off into housing? TC: Yes. It must ve been a long time ago because I don t remember anything other than about fifteen acres right here. It went from here down to Seventh East to First North. This was my grandfather s farm, and then that down there was divided between the three sons. I remember my great-grandfather and grandmother s house was down on the other side of town. EW: Now you are trying to get some kind of historical status for your farm? TC: It s an agricultural protected area, and the county has several of them, but the city doesn t have any. We turned in our application a couple of weeks ago. It doesn t mean tons except that if we want to go take out bins at six o clock in the morning instead of seven o clock we can do it. We re worried enough about being good neighbors but you still can t spray whatever you want when you want. One of the stipulations is it can t endanger people or something. It makes it a little harder to condemn property. The biggest reason we want it is so people know we re here to stay. Unless something dramatically changes, our intentions now are to stay. EW: How old is your father? TC: My dad s 81. EW: What do you think will happen to the farm when he decides he can t handle it anymore? TC: We can farm for as long as we want. It s set up so that we re buying part of it. We ve bought half of it five acres. When I graduated from high school I said, Well, I want to go buy some property in the (NU) you ll never beat buying property in Orem, so why don t you start paying? By that time, halfway through college, I decided I was going to be a schoolteacher, and then I knew farming would be a nice fit. We started buying it then. We re still paying on it. It s set up now so that we can farm it. If my nephew Scotty or one of the other grandkids has an interest in farming, as long as someone wants to farm it, they can farm it. Because there s no way you could buy it for what the property s worth. That was a concern for us, because if we had to buy from my sisters, we couldn t afford to do it. My uncle my uncle in the middle sold his property for around 130, 150 thousand an acre, and there s no way you can buy a farm for that price and pay interest on it. Crandall, Tim 8

9 EW: So your memories are of Orem already being pretty developed? TC: I guess I grew-up in a transition period because I can remember when the only McDonalds was down in Provo on Twelfth North that was by the time I was in high school. The mall was there. These houses across the street and that subdivision on that side were already there. I guess it was in a transition time, and people were selling their properties. EW: How do you think you and your family came to be more attached to the farmland? TC: My dad was a very young kid and very determined, and when everybody else found it easier to sell he said, That s not the way to go. It s really my dad. By the time I really started doing much with it the transition had really already taken place, to a big extent. But he was very determined. And when people go out of business with farms well, with any business he said, If they work hard and put a good product out they could still be in business, from storehouses going out of business to farms. That s his philosophy: if people work hard they can make it. He has a love for it, I think. He really enjoys doing it. He still goes out and spins apples. Not long ago he was out spinning apples at 6:30, and I said, Why are you out spinning apples? He said, I don t really have anything else to do. Mexicans are coming, and they can do as much in a day as we do in bits and pieces here and there. But he enjoys it and takes great pride in it. We built the greenhouse, too. We started it as kind of a hobby and thought maybe it would develop into something, and I could quit teaching school. But it has grown much quicker, and my father helps with that. EW: What do you grow in the greenhouse? TC: Bedding plants, and then planters. We ve started planters not the kind you put together in May and sell, set them out in one day. We start in about January. This planter hanging outside is one that we did. So we take great pride in it too. My father does have a love for the land. I ve been on the fruit growers board of directors. On 800 South on that side of State Street, there is what was a farmers co-op. Then the last couple of years they let a private guy do it because they kept losing money. I was probably the only one on this board of directors in Orem who was younger than forty and had more than two acres of ground. EW: What are your favorite memories from the farm? What was your favorite thing to do? TC: Picking fruit. Every year there s nothing more fun than when you open up your stand, and people come and are so pleased with what they get. It s a real sense of accomplishment too. Everybody in their yard can have a tree that blooms beautifully, but not many people can in August and September have beautiful fruit on their trees. That s a lot of fun. The challenge of it is a lot of fun, and it s rewarding. You meet nice people. That s probably the part we like best meeting the people. It s a little like your kids. There are a couple every year that come and say, This is lousy, or they say, This is too much, or Crandall, Tim 9

10 whatever. But most people are really nice. Now it s got to the point where they say, Oh, you re Crandall? Are you the ones with the farm? And I don t mind that.. Other people are apple growers. We re farmers here. One memory that I really enjoy is spending time with my family. It s been a very unique, probably not unique, but an unusual thing, because all the years we worked together we ve never had a fight. A difference of opinion, yes, but there s probably never been even a cross word. That s been probably one of the highlights of farming for me, being able to work with my dad every day. You d say somebody my age should move on, but there s still a lot to be learned. EW: That s got to be great with your kids too. TC: Oh, it is. I remember going to Salt Lake. We used to have this 1947 this old truck. It was even old when I was young. We would go see this guy in Bountiful, because Bountiful then was probably not quite as big as Orem but close. We used to take this guy apples and pumpkins in this old, old truck, and it was an all day project. You meet a lot of interesting people. We take apples up now sometimes and distribute them through AMV Produce. Half we need up there by five in the morning, and the other half of AMV produce is for a homeless shelter. We get up there at six, and that s the same time they let the homeless people out. We took our boys up one day. I take my nephew and we go deliver apples then stop at Denny s for breakfast. I don t remember any huge trips that we went on to Europe as kids; most people would say that I m very mundane. We had one family who helped us a lot, the one who lives between our two pieces of property. They have about an acre that they bought up the road. Their kids come and help us a lot. They ve helped for four or five years. The oldest one had helped and now the younger ones. The older ones are graduated. They ve helped us a lot. EW: Do you use migrant workers now? TC: Not real migrant workers. But two Mexican fellows who work for us are both here, and they have their families here. Now we really don t have tons of migrant workers come. We used to have a lot who made their way through, but we re far enough out of the road now that they don t really come. It s pretty hard to get that now because of landscaping companies and other businesses, restaurants, where it s not as hard of work. I guess landscaping companies would be hard work, but it s more steady. That s why it works out well for these guys who work for us. The guy who works nights, if he doesn t work during the day for a while he doesn t feel too bad about it. We re very careful not to use any illegal immigrants now. It used to be if a Mexican got caught, they sent them back to Mexico. They dropped them over the border, and they were back here within two or three weeks. Now I think the fine is like $10,000 to the farmer. So these guys who work for us sometimes find help. When we pick pears they can t do it all. EW: How many acres of pears do you have? Crandall, Tim 10

11 TC: We have about probably six acres of pears: six acres of pears, six acres of apples, and then an acre of cherries and an acre of peaches. We keep toying with the idea of planting more peaches because peaches are a hot item right now. EW: I hear you get very fuzzy when you try to pick peaches. TC: You do, but you can pick a lot in a hurry, and it s not quite as hard work as picking pears. Pears are really heavy. Pears are hard, but we don t pick very many. Usually what happens is by the time I get home from school, and the neighbor kids and our kids get home, they re all done. Then we spend night sorting. EW: Do you think that you ll expand your peach orchards then? TC: We keep toying with the idea. Our problem is labor during harvest time. How do you manage that much? I mean, take off pear trees? I don t know. We don t know what to take out because right now everything that we have is in really good production, and we don t have a piece of property that is not very profitable. All of our apple trees are younger than twenty years old. Pear trees are older than that, but pear trees stay good for a long time. EW: How old do you think your oldest tree is? TC: I don t know that. You d have to ask my dad. A lot older than I am. We had the ones right around my dad s house; they were big trees when I was a kid. But all of our apple trees we ve replanted. EW: Bud Smith had a couple of pear trees that were planted before he was born, and he s about ninety. They aren t the best pears, but they are still producing fruit. TC: They have this thing where if everybody froze out, then the government helps. We went down and the guy was looking at the chart, and we had to tell how old our trees were. The man said, Oh, it doesn t matter for pears because they grow up to seventy years or sixty years or something. EW: So that didn t work a whole lot for you? TC: No. The other thing we found out is we are too productive, even on a bad year, to really qualify. When you only have so much ground, you pack more into what you have. We don t have acres and acres spread out, so we have everything planted very close. EW: You don t need to get anything when you have a bad year? TC: That s true. We didn t even know about this thing until some guy called and said, Go and do this. It s as much a hobby for us as anything. We live off what we make teaching school. If we make something off the farm, that s good, and if we don t But we do. It doesn t always show on paper, but we do fine. Crandall, Tim 11

12 EW: What s your favorite fruit? TC: Probably apples. If no one liked pears better than I do, we d be in trouble. But I like apples and peaches. I love apples. That s how we started making apple juice; I bought this little craft that had a corkscrew on the top when I was in high school, and I d take it with about ten gallons. I really like apple juice now. Vern Stratton still has a lot of farm. He s moved most of it from here. EW: That seems to be the trend. TC: It is. In fact we ve had several kinds of people come and say, You can sell one acre here. Why don t you go south? My dad had great insight because so many years ago everyone s farm was forty or fifty acres around here, because it was so hard to take care of. Anything bigger than that was a pretty big farm. Even thirty years ago you could sell one acre here and buy ten in Santaquin or Payson. A lot of people went, and probably financially we have come out better than most. Bigger is not always better. Some have done very well. We stayed in the middle, and you never lose much and you never make much. If you go down there you re either going to do very well and some of them have done very well or you re going to lose. My grandfather got sick when he was not very old he had heart problems, so my dad was the oldest and did a lot of the work there. In one way that s all my dad has known really he d better be here for the watering turn and things. EW: I ve been told there have been quite a few disputes in the area over water rights, and it s been a touchy subject for a long time. Do you know much about that? TC: I don t. That may be something that my dad knows about, but since I remember it s always been pretty well taken care of. EW: One man that I talked to said that there was a case in the early fifties where a man murdered his nephew over water rights. TC: A fellow who never gets mad got mad because somebody took his water, especially in a year like this. Ours is in our ditch there about seventy-something hours a week, and we have forty-eight shares of it. EW: Your dad and John, were they the only ones to really keep any of the farmland they had? TC: I had one brother-in-law who borrowed some for one or two years. My dad ran all of the farm for some years. Finally he said, This isn t a good deal. I m better off to take my little bit and do that. Then we leased a little bit. We leased five acres and planted trees on it. Then a guy decided we were making too much money because we took this piece of ground that was nobody did anything with it and it was a pretty apple orchard. It was about five acres, and then he decided we were doing too well on it. When we leased it, the lease was for practically nothing because if he could get anything out of it, it was better than nothing. But when he saw Crandall, Tim 12

13 what was happening... So we don t lease ground anymore, because these trees were about twelve or thirteen years old, and he only had a good crop on them for three or four years. We have nearly as many trees now on the thirteen acres as there were on the thirty-five acres. It used to be you planted trees for a long time. Yes, and they were big. One hundred years ago ground was nothing. You had more ground than you had anything else. So you might as well spread them out because it s easier to take care of them. Crandall, Tim 13