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TI: So let's kind of walk through when you made the decision, you and your brother, to come back and help your dad, to go from essentially a grower operation to a grower-packer and the shipping, kind of selling, more vertically integrated. So it started off, did you guys have a master plan? Did you kind of know what you wanted to do? I mean, it felt like, yeah, what were you thinking?

LI: Well, the one thing that we did know is that you're going to get another cut. Not only did we have the growers' cut, but we had the shippers' cut. And if we could keep our costs down on the shipping end of things, there's a pretty good margin there. And my dad was a good grower, my brother Wayne was a good salesman. And I liked to build things, and we were building things that were going to cost double or triple, but we, what would have had to pay if we didn't build it ourselves. And so we were building a good team. It's just not our family, but we had Hispanic workers, people who have been with our farm ever since I got back to the farm. And they're just like my brothers and my sisters. And working with those guys, I mean, I had my engineering skills. And so I could lay it out, but I have some very talented welders and tractor drivers and just very discriminating workers that were excellent.

TI: So at the beginning when you came back from Battelle and you started doing the hydrocoolers, about how many farm crops, how many acres were you guys farming at that time?

LI: I think we started with, like, two hundred acres.

TI: Okay, two hundred acres. Because at some point you started as the engineer in terms of the hydrocooler, you had to start scaling. Like how large should this be and how much we can cool. And so early on, did you start thinking, oh, we're going to build and have the capacity to be bigger, is that what you guys were thinking?

LI: Well, I always thought that whatever we do, we always have to add, make it so that you have the capacity to add on without having to go backwards. Because we had to work so hard to get to where we were, I didn't want to throw anything away. So I always want to make sure we're creating and not have to just walk away from it and start over. And so that's why now we have a building that's attached to another building. And as we grew, we would add another 20-foot to a 30-foot wide building. And we did it, we tried to do it because have this, what we thought was this huge loan for building the cold rooms and the hydrocoolers, we'd try to do everything outside of cash. And so by having that one step up on the chain of distribution there, there were a lot of opportunities to make money. And so we would buy property with cash, we would build buildings with cash, and I would get the permit on the minimum building for the design, to get the permit in the rough. And then we would put all the walls and insulation and the electrical wiring. And if we're going to put any other infrastructure in, we'd do that out of -- and we would expense that -- we would do that with our workers. What that allowed us to do was keep our good workers employed. And so we'd do the farming during the main season, and in the offseason, we would build. We built it. We built our farmworker housing. We built, we poured concrete, we built equipment. And we did all those things, and it allowed us to keep busy and we could cut the cost of having to purchase that from somebody else.

TI: So it seemed like the business model, so when you decided to more vertically integrate, and you were able to, in particular, do the hydrocooler and the cold room and all that, that gave you a competitive advantage.

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