<Begin Segment 24>

Female voice: I just want to ask a question, and I don't know if you could answer it, but it seems like the face of agriculture really changed after the Japanese were taken away to camp. And maybe the Filipinos took up that place in, you know, taking over agriculture for the island. But now agriculture on the island is just almost non-existent. Maybe there's two working farms or something. So, anyway, I was kind of hoping you could talk about that and did the Japanese, after they came back, they saw that it wasn't worth it to run their farms? And was it kind of a slow dissipation or was it pretty abrupt after the war?

FK: Well, I think after the war, when we came back, almost everybody that was farming went back into farming. And in a lot of ways it was really tough because they borrowed all this money to get their plants and things and they were just getting out of the Depression and just getting to where things were profitable and then they lost it all again. So they all pretty much started over. And when they started over, they, again, made the farming industry just really flourishing on the island. But as the years go by, you find that it's harder and harder to get pickers, there's less and less people from, Native Canadians who want to make the long trip down and spend time here picking. The health codes become more and more stringent as far as housing. So you... that's become more of an expense. The weather is always a gamble, berry season on the island used to, used to start in May. But the weather's changed so much now that, that when I was a kid going to school after the war, strawberry season didn't start 'til June. So the, the season's become more compressed. The more it rains, the more the fruit's rotten. The better the crop, the lower the prices. The worse the crop, the less berries you have, the better the prices. So it's almost like you're always, no matter whether you raise a good crap, crop or not, you're always... oh, maybe "crap" was the right word. [Laughs] But it's always like it's a gamble, you know, it's always like a gamble. And, and zoning laws are coming into effect, and farmers are finding that unless they sell off their property before all these zoning laws come into effect, they're not gonna get return for the land they've invested in.

So it got to the point where people decided farming is really a gamble and you're not really making that much money for it, you can get more money from the land. So, people started thinking about either developing their properties or selling their property to developers. And, and the taxes are going up every year on your land. If your farming stays low but, you know, it doesn't, it's still going up. So expenses get higher, it gets harder to get pickers, it gets harder to produce your crop. Expenses are getting higher with fertilizer and all this kind of stuff. And I think eventually the farmers just decided this is not paying off any longer, so they started selling their land. And, and that's their retirement; that's the only thing they have for retirement, is their land. And I think that's why we're down to maybe one large farm right now, which the Suyematsu farm is run by somebody else. And again, people got older, kids who grew up on the farm didn't want to farm, so you didn't have anybody to take over your property for you. It took me years and years and years to want to eat a raspberry, because we had 22 acres of raspberry for so many years and I, and I just took a lotta years before I decided maybe raspberries aren't so bad after all. So, people that are farming now, or starting farming now, it's almost like a hobby for them, and that might survive. But if you really truly want to make a living farming, it's just really hard to do. Unless, unless so many farms go under that you're the only farm left, then maybe you can. But that's kinda the way things are right now.

Female voice: I was going to ask one other question. What was the market for all of the produce that was run by the farmers on Bainbridge? Was it Pike Place Market?

FK: Most of the farming, actually the strawberries, they pretty much had contracted either with National Fruit or... what was it? There was a guy on the island that had a cannery thing. But most of the strawberries went to cannery. So you picked them, you load 'em up in trucks, and you bring 'em to, near the Filipino Hall where the National Fruit Company used to pick up berries, and that made it simple. Before the war there were, they built their own cannery, and used to can 'em and ship 'em off in cans to Seattle. But after the war, it was pretty much contracting with the persons who sold you the plant to, to sell the berries there. My mother, again being unusual, never picked canners. She always picked fresh market berries, for raspberries. So we would pick the berries all day, load 'em up in a truck and bring them to Seattle to United Fruit or Pacific Fruit or one of those places along First Avenue. First, well, it'd be more the southern part of First Avenue. And, and so she would pick fresh market berries, and you'd have to be real careful about doing those 'cause those go out to the grocery stores. And then when that slowed down, she got a contract to pack 'em up, strap 'em up, and ship 'em off to Denver. So our berries would go out, we'd bring our berries out to the airport, and they'd load 'em up on the plane and they'd ship 'em off to Denver. So, and I don't know how she always got these ideas, but that's just kinda the way she was. If something was clogged up, she'd do something else. But, again, you know, you start getting old, plants start getting old, and, and you can't find pickers, and that's why she went to Christmas trees. She didn't have to get pickers -- [laughs] -- and she just had you-pick Christmas trees. So, it was, it was like, it was just, Bainbridge Island was not being that conducive to being an agricultural-type place anymore. It was becoming a bedroom community for Seattle, taxes were going up, you could make more money by building a house on it than growing, growing plants on it. So...

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.