The Brentwood Cherry Growers Cooperative conference room was a place that received little sunlight even during the day. Because the windows faced north, the warm April spring sun passed it by, leaving only the fluorescent lights to cast a cold glow over the table.
Thomas Cromwell looked down at the coffee cup in front of him and spoke.
“I passed by the Harris farm yesterday... They were grafting.”
No one answered. But among them, Dexter Price could be seen frowning deeply and letting out a sigh.
“They were tearing up the whole two hundred acres. Royal Tioga, even Coral Champagne. I didn’t count how many trees there were... but it looked like they had over a hundred workers.”
Dexter clicked his tongue under his breath.
“How much did you get for cherries this year?”
“What’s the point of asking? It’ll only piss me off more.”
Thomas, in a foul mood, leaned back in his chair. Outside the window, he could see the cherry trees on his farm swaying in the spring breeze. They were Bing cherry trees that had stood in the same place for twenty-two years. They had blossomed and borne fruit again this year, but to Thomas, it no longer looked as satisfying as it once had.
Dexter, his wrinkled face full of fatigue, spat out irritably.
“They say people are lining up for them at Japanese department stores. They’re the same Brentwood cherries, but ours go in by the Costco box, while Harris’s are wrapped one by one like jewels and flown out by plane.”
“That’s because the variety is different. Because the technology is different.”
Thomas spoke in a voice filled with discontent. He did not want to admit it, but it was true. Royal Tioga had a higher sugar content and deeper color than Bing cherries. On top of that, everyone had only just learned that the hydro-cooling equipment the Harris farm had brought in helped with exports, and now they were all watching one another, each considering buying a unit.
“Then can’t we do it too?”
At last, Dexter placed his elbows on the table and leaned forward. As if he had already been thinking about it for some time, he continued without hesitation.
“We can get the saplings, and if we have the money, we can get the equipment. If we plant Royal Tioga, then in four years, we’ll also...”
“You’re saying we should switch varieties?”
When Thomas asked quietly, Dexter shrugged.
“Is there a reason we can’t?”
“Ask William Hartford.”
At the mention of the cooperative chairman, Dexter stopped speaking and looked at Thomas. They both knew. They knew what William Hartford would say.
Just then, the conference room door flew open, and William Hartford stepped inside. He read the expressions on the two men’s faces at once. Having led the cooperative for so long, his eyes immediately sensed that the air in the room was not ordinary.
“What were you talking about?”
Thomas, who had expected that this situation would arise someday, spoke first with a calm expression.
“Changing varieties.”
Hartford, who knew exactly because of whom talk of changing varieties had come up, raised his eyebrows ever so slightly before lowering them again. After all, in Brentwood, there was only one farm that had left the cooperative over a change in variety and gone on to succeed on its own.
“Because of the Harris farm?”
“We can’t deny it. The price they get and the price we get are different from the start...”
As he said, it was a fact that could not be denied. There was no one here who did not know how different the unit prices were on the purchase orders coming from Costco, Walmart, and the like.
William Hartford, who was certainly angry, sat down and adjusted the front of his jacket. He did not rush. He was a man who had learned through decades of cooperative life that if he showed anger or haste, he lost.
“You’re saying we should plant Royal Tioga?”
“Are you saying we can’t?”
Dexter asked with a hint of expectation. Hartford looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then turned his gaze back to the two men.
“I’m not saying it’s wrong. But think about it. Right now, most of our members make their living off Bing cherries. It’s what we’ve built over decades. If we pull out those trees and plant Royal Tioga, it’ll be four years until the first harvest. How are we supposed to survive those four years?”
“Besides, that would be as good as admitting the Harris farm was right. We change our varieties by following that girl’s farm? The Brentwood Cherry Growers get down on their knees like that?”
There was certainty in William’s voice rather than anger. Thomas listened to him and, for a moment, could say nothing. Because he thought his words were not wrong either.
Enduring four years was no easy thing. Interest had to be paid, wages had to be paid, and income was needed for life to go on. From the moment they planted Royal Tioga saplings, the farm would, for four years, effectively become only half a farm.
But another thought was circling inside Thomas’s mind. If they did nothing like this and another four years passed, then what? Would the price of Bing cherries rise by then? His conclusion was “no.”
But he could not bring himself to say it aloud, and in the end, only an awkward silence flowed through the conference room.
-
At the same time, at the additional two hundred acres of cherry farmland secured by the Harris farm.
Chloe stood in the middle of the field with a wide-brimmed hat pulled low, talking with her father, Frederick, while workers moved busily in every direction around them, planting saplings and continuing the grafting.
“Joseph! Check the row spacing over there again! I measured it earlier, and the corner of Block C is off!”
Her voice spread across the entire field. Watching Joseph raise his hand in the distance, Frederick said,
“How’s the progress?”
“Maybe because we have more skilled workers now, but the pace has gotten pretty fast. Still, we’ll have to keep at it straight through until harvest.”
“The losses must be fairly large.”
“We’re still short on skilled workers, so we have no choice but to give up one year’s farming. It can’t be helped.”
If it were simple labor, they could throw hundreds of people at it at once and push through by sheer speed, but grafting required considerable skill. It was a task that required precisely joining the cambium layer of the existing rootstock tree with the cambium layer of the scion.
If the two cut surfaces were misaligned by even one millimeter, the grafted section would not harden and would simply dry out. That was why there was a limit to how many people they could deploy.
If a clumsy person did it, most of the grafted trees could end up ruined, and then they would have to graft them all over again. From the beginning, it was more important to do it properly, even if the pace was slow.
The one fortunate thing was that Chloe had been preparing for this since a year ago. She had tracked down veteran grafting workers from Napa Valley vineyards in advance and signed contracts with them, and thanks to bringing in trainees from agricultural technical schools near Brentwood as well, they were able to move at this pace now. If they had not been moving according to the block-by-block replacement schedule designed by Brian, it would have been overwhelming to figure out where to even begin with this vast field.
“What about the almonds?”
Frederick grinned and looked at his daughter affectionately.
“Thanks to you, your brother is excitedly meeting people.”
“Tell him to keep it under control since it’s not confirmed yet.”
“I already told him that. He’s running around because of almond supply, not because we’re going to run the factory more.”
It was an almond farm of as much as two hundred acres, but since Brian had said almond prices might rise sharply, they were in the middle of securing almonds being sold cheaply, just in case.
In reality, California almond prices fluctuated every year. Sometimes they hit bottom in the low one-dollar range per pound, and when drought or cold damage overlapped, they easily surpassed two dollars. Brian had not separately explained the basis for his prediction that prices would rise this year, but because his judgment had never been wrong so far, Brandon was moving without complaint.
The reason they could respond with such ease was the profitability of almond milk. Since they were supplying the raw ingredients themselves, material costs were not high, and because they were selling the milk at a premium price, they were making considerable profits even though the volume sold was not enormous.
“How much have we made so far?”
“Last year’s sales were nine hundred fifty thousand dollars, and this year, one million dollars already came in during the first quarter.”
“Ooh! That’s good, isn’t it?”
If they assumed they had only sold almonds as before, and calculated last year’s almond price at around one and a half dollars per pound, their sales would not even have reached seven hundred thousand dollars.
But last year alone, the almonds generated nine hundred fifty thousand dollars in sales, and this year, one million dollars in sales had already occurred in the first quarter, so compared to operating only an almond farm, they were producing incomparable sales. It was a revenue structure on an entirely different level from when they had only farmed raw materials.
Once equipment depreciation, labor costs, and distribution costs were deducted, the actual profit in hand would decrease further, but even taking that into account, it was not comparable to simply running a farm.
“Exactly. And if you connect us to Zenno Group and we move forward with an export contract, well... it’ll be incredible, won’t it? Hahaha!”
“I told you it might not happen.”
“I know, I said I know.”
At that moment, Frederick caught sight of a pickup truck parked by the roadside beyond the far boundary of the farm. He could see people sitting inside.
“Hm?”
Chloe followed her father’s gaze and gave a small laugh.
“That’s the car that was parked there yesterday too.”
“It belongs to a cooperative member, doesn’t it? Looks like Thomas Cromwell...”
“He comes by sometimes. I’ve been pretending not to notice.”
“Hmm... Tell the farm security guards not to let their guard down.”
Chloe, already the cherry queen of California, had earned millions of dollars from the profits of her pear farm alone. So, following the advice of her father and Brian, she had been preparing for possible contingencies through a private security company.
“Of course. But I think it’s probably more envy than danger.”
“I think so too, but... you never know what can happen in this world.”
“Yes, I understand.”
Chloe adjusted the brim of her hat once and walked back among the workers.
“Lucas! The roots of that sapling are facing the wrong way, the wrong way! Do it again!”
Her voice rang sharply across the farm once more.
It was not until evening that Thomas Cromwell returned to his own farm.
He got out of his truck and walked into the farm. The western sky was dyed red, and the cherry trees, catching that light, cast long shadows. Twenty-two years. That was the time he had spent with these trees. When he first planted them, Thomas had just gotten married, and his daughter had been born the year after these trees produced their first harvest.
That daughter had gone to college this year.
Thomas stopped in front of an old cherry tree. He placed his hand on its thick trunk. The feel of the rough, hard bark was transmitted to his palm. It was hard to imagine pulling these trees out now. But leaving these trees as they were and spending another ten years like this was something he wanted to imagine even less.
Earlier that day, he had seen Chloe at the Harris farm. A small-framed girl with her hat pulled low, running around in the middle of the field and shouting at the workers. Thomas remembered what the people of Brentwood had said when that girl first inherited the farm.
“Frederick’s daughter says she’s going to run the farm? She’ll collapse soon enough.”
And when Hartford blocked the waterway and the cooperative members nodded, saying it served them right, Thomas had nodded along with them. It was a shameful memory. Back then, everyone believed the Harris farm would be forced to its knees. But Frederick dug into the ground and drew up water, and Chloe grew cherries with that water. And now, the cherries from that girl’s farm were being flown to Japan.
Just then, he felt a vibration in his pocket. It was Dexter.
[I’m thinking of going to the Harris farm tomorrow. Want to come with me?]
Thomas read the message and stared at the screen for a long time. His thumb stopped over the keypad.
Going to the Harris farm might mean turning his back on Hartford. The relationships he had formed over decades of cooperative life would be shaken, and Hartford was not an easy man when it came to that sort of thing. Everyone knew that once he marked you, life inside the cooperative became uncomfortable.
But Thomas could not shake off the scene he had seen that afternoon. The massive project of gradually tearing up two hundred acres. He knew that the Harris farm, too, was now earning tremendous profits through that same step-by-step overhaul.
While that massive work was underway, he and his colleagues had laughed at Frederick, calling it a pointless thing to do, and wasted the years in vain. After having watched that, could he really say that the decision to give up immediate harvests while looking four years ahead was wrong?
Thomas knew very well how much his own farm’s Bing cherries were going for this year. The low one-dollar range per pound. When there was a bumper crop, even that fell further. When the entire cooperative dumped its volume onto the market, prices hit bottom, and the losses fell entirely on the farm owners. Royal Tioga, on the other hand, was different. At least three to four dollars per pound. It had to be seen as an astonishing profit margin.
In the end, he sent a reply.
[What time?]
After sending it, he put his phone back in his pocket. Then he turned his gaze back to the cherry tree in front of him. A twenty-two-year-old tree. But in the end, a tree was a tree. If the owner made the decision, it was something that could be changed.
Thomas took his hand off the tree and began walking toward the house.