Not many days after Sato Takeshi’s visit, another Japanese man arrived at Harris Farm. It was Kuroda Masayuki of Itochu Corporation.
Because Harris Farm’s cherries had been selling so exceptionally well, Kuroda went into the negotiations with a slight sense of tension. Naturally, he assumed that numerous distributors across North America must have been flocking to Harris Farm, and that securing volume might not be easy. On top of that, he had even heard that someone from Zen-Noh Trading had been in and out of Harris Farm a few days earlier to secure cherries. He could not help feeling pressed.
Unexpectedly, however, the negotiations went smoothly. Chloe, the farm owner, accepted the full volume he had wanted. When the negotiations ended more quickly than expected, Kuroda Masayuki looked faintly flustered.
“Then... may I understand that we’ll proceed under the same terms as last year?”
“The export volume to Japan will be the same as last year. Instead, we can add more Royal Tioga to premium distribution channels within the United States. Not the Ginza and Aoyama channels Itochu has secured, but channels in the West.”
Kuroda thought for a moment, then nodded. It was not a bad condition. Keeping the Japanese volume from being taken away was enough, and with domestic U.S. distribution added on top, there was nothing for him to lose.
“Understood. Let’s do that.”
Chloe rose from her seat and offered her hand. Having confirmed that there would be no issue securing cherries this year, Kuroda’s grip felt firm and full of confidence. He must have known Sato had visited the day before, yet he never asked until the end. He probably knew that the moment he asked, he would put himself at a disadvantage. He was a clever man.
“I look forward to working with you, Mr. Kuroda.”
“As do we. We look forward to another good year.”
After seeing him off and turning back, a female employee opened the office door and poked her head in.
“Ms. Chloe, there are visitors at the main gate. They don’t have an appointment, but they said they really want to see you.”
“Who are they?”
“They say they’re Mr. Thomas Cromwell and Mr. Dexter Price from the Cherry Growers Cooperative.”
Chloe was slightly surprised. She had known that Thomas was the man watching from inside the pickup truck parked along the road beyond the farm boundary yesterday, so she knew he was interested in her farm. But she had not expected him to come so directly like this. Since leaving the cooperative, it was the first time another member had personally visited the farm. And they were people who had spent decades alongside Hartford...
“I’ll go out.”
Before they were members of the cooperative she had left, they were people who had once been close to her father, Frederick. She felt it would be better to go out first rather than receive them while sitting still.
As she walked toward the main gate, two men were standing beside an old pickup truck in front of the privately hired guards. Thomas Cromwell was in his early sixties, the very image of a Brentwood farmer, his sun-darkened face deeply lined. Dexter Price was a little younger than him, but the thick joints of his hands showed just how long he had worked the fields. Both had come neatly dressed. They were not wearing the work clothes they usually wore in the fields, but shirts they would take out when going somewhere. That was what touched Chloe’s heart first.
It could not have been easy for them to come all the way here.
“Hello.”
Thomas took off his hat and hesitated. Before speaking, he exchanged a glance with Dexter. It was a look of mutual encouragement.
“It’s been a long time, Chloe.”
“Yes. I don’t even know how many years it’s been. How is Catherine?”
“She’s doing well. She says she’ll be getting married to her boyfriend soon.”
“Ah... I didn’t know. We haven’t been in touch much lately. Please tell her congratulations for me.”
“You should tell her yourself.”
By telling her to contact Catherine directly, he was likely hoping she would maintain her friendship with his daughter. But after taking up farming, Chloe had become too busy to leisurely chat with friends. Besides, Catherine had not been a school friend; she was simply Mr. Thomas’s daughter, much older than Chloe, and they had never been particularly close.
“I’ve just been so busy.”
“Then I suppose it can’t be helped. I’ll tell her.”
Thomas smiled bitterly, sensing that the gap between them had grown much wider now. Though she was far younger than his own daughter, Chloe was now
the Cherry Queen, with a full 400 acres in California.
Chloe looked at the two of them for a moment, then asked,
“What brings you here?”
“To be honest... we came because of Royal Tioga. Hmm...”
After hesitating a little, Thomas gave an awkward smile and continued.
“We looked into exporting cherries to Japan this year, but they told us Bing cherries wouldn’t really work. They said we’d need hydrocooling equipment and... more than that, they said it’d be hard to get a high unit price for Bing cherries. If we don’t have the equipment and the variety is different, the price wouldn’t be much different from what we get in North America, so there’d be no reason to export, would there?”
Dexter, who had been quietly listening, added from beside him.
“To be honest, we’d like to switch to Royal Tioga too. But we don’t know where or how to begin. I heard you acquired Samuel Reed’s farm before and started switching the whole place over from last year, right? We thought if we came and saw it for ourselves, we might get some sense of what to do.”
Thomas immediately took over.
“I know it’s a shameless favor to ask, but it’s not as if we’re strangers, right? We came because we felt we couldn’t go on like this anymore. No matter what Chairman Hartford says. Could we ask for your help?”
At those words, Chloe’s gaze changed slightly. She had suffered quite a few difficulties because of the Cherry Growers Cooperative, but in truth, if one thought about it, it was thanks to that very situation that Harris Farm’s standing had risen so high.
Chloe looked back and forth between the two men. Their neatly worn shirts, the hats clutched tightly in their hands, and the look in their eyes that made it easy to imagine how much they must have wavered the entire way here.
Her heart softened, and Chloe nodded.
“Come in.”
As the three of them walked toward the grafting site, no one spoke. Chloe walked ahead and the two men followed behind her, and from the sound of their footsteps alone, she could feel how cautious they were. Like people invited into someone else’s house for the first time.
When they arrived at the site, Thomas’s steps naturally slowed.
Two hundred acres. Workers moved densely across the fields that seemed to stretch endlessly. Flags had been planted in each section, dividing the land into blocks, and in the areas where grafting had already been completed, tender new shoots were sprouting pale green from the ends of branches. To the eyes of farmers with decades of experience, no explanation was necessary. They could tell at a glance how meticulously planned the work was, and how skilled the hands of those workers were.
Dexter spotted something and stopped in front of a tree where the grafting had already been completed. He bent at the waist to peer at the graft union, then carefully brushed it with his fingers. Where the grafting tape had been wound tightly, the union had already begun to form.
“Where did you get the seedlings?”
“Zaiger Genetics. They’re the ones who developed the original Royal Tioga cultivar.”
“They sell to private farms too, then?”
“Of course. That’s how I was able to buy them. If the quantity is large enough, there’s no reason they wouldn’t sell.”
Dexter nodded as he listened. Thomas silently looked around the site. The areas where new shoots had already emerged, the areas where grafting was underway, and the areas where the existing trees still stood had all been divided by block. They were not changing everything at once, but replacing them in stages. It was a way to change varieties without cutting off income.
“You’re replacing one-third each year?”
“That’s right. In our case, Harris Farm has already completed its variety replacement, so we can afford to take the hit of having income dip for a year or two. But for your farms, you could change little by little according to your own situation.”
“Mm...”
Thomas remembered what Hartford had said in the conference room about how they were supposed to survive four years. But looking at this farm now, he could see the answer. They did not pull everything out at once; they divided it by blocks and replaced one side while the existing trees on the other side continued to generate revenue. In that case, the issue was not fearing four years, but how to design those four years.
At that, Thomas felt as if something that had been tightly blocked somewhere in his chest was slowly loosening.
By the time the tour ended, the three of them stopped at the edge of the field. Thomas turned toward Chloe, holding his hat in his hands, hesitated for a moment, then opened his mouth.
“You see... we want to do this too.”
It was a short sentence, forced out with difficulty, but Chloe felt she understood how long it had taken for those words to come out. The time he had spent yesterday parked along the roadside, watching from afar. The time he had spent today taking out a clean shirt and coming all the way here. And the time he had spent holding himself back throughout the tour to finally say this now.
As if he felt the same, Dexter nodded once beside Thomas. But Chloe did not answer right away. She looked at the grafting site for a moment, then turned her gaze to the two men.
“Does Chairman Hartford know?”
In truth, she knew this was what would put them in the most difficult position. Harris Farm, having left the cooperative, was now completely outside his shadow, but those still growing Bing cherries would know very well how powerful William Hartford’s influence was.
If he set his mind on making things difficult for a cooperative member, Chloe knew from experience just how hard he could make it for them.
The two men exchanged troubled looks. That alone was enough. It meant they knew how Hartford would react, but had come without telling him.
“So he doesn’t know...”
If they had not told him yet, there was nothing Chloe could do for them. She could not carelessly bring up changing cherry varieties. It was a matter that would crack the order of the cooperative that had persisted for decades.
Chloe turned her gaze toward the site and said quietly,
“I’ll think about it a little more first.”
The two men nodded. Knowing it was not a rejection, their faces did not look too bad.
“We need to think it over more ourselves...”
From Thomas’s words, it seemed he had not yet decided exactly what he wanted to do either.
“Please do.”
Soon, the pickup truck they had come in drove out of the farm.
At the same time, at Hartford Farm on the outskirts of Brentwood.
William Hartford was sitting in his study. He was looking out the window with a glass of wine in hand when his secretary knocked on the door.
“Chairman, I have something to report.”
“Come in.”
The secretary entered, closed the door, and stood before Hartford.
“I’ve just been told that Thomas Cromwell and Dexter Price visited Harris Farm.”
“What are you talking about? Those two? Are you certain?”
“They say grafting is in full swing at the Samuel farm she acquired recently, and one of the workers participating there saw them.”
At the unexpected news, Hartford’s hand stilled. He slowly set the wineglass down on the table and looked at his secretary.
“How long were they there?”
“They were there for more than an hour, but... the worker said he doesn’t know what they discussed.”
William said nothing. He slowly tapped the table with his fingers. Once, twice, three times.
It was not entirely unexpected. A few days earlier in the conference room, he had already sensed something unusual in Thomas and Dexter’s eyes. But actually hearing that the two of them had walked directly into Harris Farm felt different.
Chloe, the daughter of that family he had all but driven out of the cooperative. Even after he blocked the waterways and tightened the market around them, she had endured to the end, and now she had become the most famous cherry farm owner in California. And now she was beginning to encroach upon his own cooperative members.
“Contact Thomas. Tell him to come see me tomorrow morning. Dexter as well.”
The secretary nodded and was about to leave when Hartford spoke again.
“And...”
“Yes, Chairman.”
“Bring me the allocation chart for this season’s cooperative shipments again. I need to check how much volume Thomas and Dexter’s farms have.”
The secretary’s expression stiffened slightly before returning to blankness.
“Understood.”
After the door closed, Hartford picked up his wineglass again. He brought it to his lips, stopped, and set it back down. Suddenly, he had no appetite for the taste of wine.
The allocation of cooperative shipments was the chairman’s authority. Deciding which farm’s cherries would be assigned to which distributor and in what order of priority. On the surface, it looked like rational management, but in reality, it was a structure that allowed the chairman to put any particular farm at a disadvantage if he so chose. For decades, that authority had never become an issue. The cooperative members had never questioned Hartford’s decisions.
But whether Thomas and Dexter could withstand it was another matter.