Ronda Driediger
Doesn’t everyone want to do more with less?
Greater yields with less inputs? Yes please! Higher returns on less time invested in the field? Absolutely!
This desire to do more with less has led to many advancements in farming. Berry growers, like Rhonda Driediger of Driediger Farms, have always strived for improvements, but doing more with less has shifted from a desire to a necessity in today’s environment.
Driediger Farms started in 1964 and has always been a family-run business with ownership shifting among family members over time. Driediger and her husband Peter Olson bought in, in the 1990s, then eventually acquired full ownership. The operation began as a 10-acre strawberry farm then grew to a peak of 250 acres. In the early 1980s, the family started into raspberries, then in the late 1980s blueberries came on line as a few acres of bushes were transplanted from a nearby farm.
Now, at 160 acres, Driediger Farms has 95 acres of blueberries, 23 acres of raspberries and 16 acres of high-density strawberries as well as smaller amounts of blackberries and red currants. This is in addition to fallow land, houses, buildings and roadways. Plus, there’s the road-side market that has doubled in size in recent years.
“In 2013 we doubled the size of it, to about 3,000 square feet,” Driediger says. “We try to find as many new or up-and-coming BC products. Like the goat’s milk soap we have. We order it a couple of times a year.”
The market allows the farm to offer a range of products that position it as more than a place to get great berries – it’s also somewhere to buy produce, eggs, ice cream, baked goods, artisan creations and specialty gift items. Making the market a destination also allows for an increased per-customer sale at the till.
“The market used to be a third of our income and now it’s one-fifteenth of our income even though it’s doubled what it was in the late 90s,” she says.
The Driedigers have always recognized the need to innovate to stay at the forefront of the industry.
“Back in the 70s my mom started a U-pick,” she says. “And we started having an on-farm market. Then we started doing more fresh to consumer [berries] and less [processing] berries.”
The processing berries continued to decline and the family ramped up their plans for fresh varieties in the fields. In the mid 90’s Driediger’s brothers started doing blueberry packing and she came on board in 1997.
By Ronda Payne
Driediger Farms
“Shortly after I got here, the blueberry co-op went under,” she says. “There was just more and more blueberries being planted. It was an opportunity to do more value-added.”
In 2006/2007, the Driedigers started packing more berries.
“In 2010 we started building a new fresh plant, finished that in 2011,” she says. “In 2012 we built a freezer ready for use in 2013. That was the first year we ran our IQF tunnel. It was a lot of trial and error.”
Today, Driediger Farms continues to fresh pack blueberries and also does IQF strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries. The company provides pitting and IQF for dark sweet cherries for Okanagan growers as well. The IQF portion of the business is mostly blueberries and cherries.
On the consumer-facing side of the business, families come to the market or the U-pick fields and may want to enjoy an ice cream at the picnic benches in the shade. Driediger added a playground area with a giant bouncing pillow (like a ground-mounted trampoline) so that parents can relax while kids are busy.
She doesn’t see Driediger Farms becoming an agri-tourism stop like those with a petting zoo, hayrides and cafe, but instead, sees the market and U-pick aspects of the business as a shorter break in someone’s day where they can enjoy themselves while purchasing fruit and other items.
“We want to stay current and we want to add events and have an event structure,” she adds.
Events are an extension to the business without having to add more capital-heavy investments. Some of these include the Mad Hatter Tea Party supporting Langley Hospice, a summer festival which raises money for Langley’s Tiny Kittens Society and plans for long-table dinners.
Growth and change has also come to Driedigers, and throughout the industry, via automation.
“Obviously the cost of labour has been horrendous, so there’s more mechanization,” she says. “Not just around harvest, but also in the plant.”
The operation now uses laser sorters to help keep in-plant costs down and as Driediger notes, the quality of automated harvesting machines has grown exponentially better.
“I’d say the valley is 60 per cent machine-picked for blueberries,” she says. “That was unheard of 10 years ago. Raspberries, we machine-pick because not one wants to pick raspberries – it’s more physically demanding – and the quality is so much better.”
Part of the benefit of automation has come from growers learning to adjust and use their machines more efficiently for specific crops.
“Just getting labour is a problem,” she adds. “We bring in Mexican workers under the SAWP program. They’re running the harvesting machines and sorting machines in the plant.”
The high-density strawberry fields is another way to do more with less and Driediger says they are still learning how to manage this compacted crop at harvest time.
“We needed to grow more strawberries per acre,” she says, adding that increasing the number of plants per acre is essential to viability.
What was once 11,000 plants per acre is now 19,000 plants per acre on hills, in plastic.
“They’re all on drip irrigation, so water use is way, way down,” she notes. “Plus there’s no dirt on the berries so all the berries we grow are saleable.”
Additionally, less water and plastic-covered hills means less weeds and less chemicals.
“Our fertilizer for the whole farm is all now custom-blended per crop, per field,” she explains. “We only apply what the plant needs.”
She adds that chemical companies are striving to come up with softer products that are more targeted and can be applied once rather than through multiple applications. This works to reduce labour, chemical costs and helps pollinators.
“We have an IPM system we’ve used for almost 30 years now,” she says. “There’s not enough trained people though.”
Driediger recognizes that it’s hard for growers to get Integrated Pest Management specialists on their farms with the number of specialists in the occupation working at, or near, capacity. She is able to maintain a healthy ecosystem on the farm for about $6,000 a year. The results of what the IPM specialists learn at Driedigers is collated into a mass report to help other growers and IPM specialists understand what’s happening in the industry.
Another area that is seeing innovation and improvement is the berry breeding programs, especially work in blueberries. She notes that BC Berry Cultivar Development Inc. research scientist Michael Dossett is doing great work.
“We’ve always gotten plants out of Michigan’s breeding program or Oregon State,” she says, adding, those varieties weren’t always successful in the Lower Mainland because the conditions are different. “We’ve always had a breeding program for strawberries and raspberries, so it’s important for blueberries.”
Dreidiger continues to make changes at the farm and notes that growers need to keep, “looking at how something will be better for staff, for you, for the crop, and then make those changes.”
For example, improvements made on her strawberry procedures have made it so that a flat very seldom needs to be checked when it comes in.
“They’re picked right into their containers,” she says. “By the time it gets to the market, [that work of checking] has already been done.”
Innovation is key for the survival of berry growers, but the truth is that it always has been. New ideas will continue to be found and shared to improve the industry no matter what shape it takes in the future. ■
