WINCHESTER (Virginia) STAR September 19, 2006
The sweet fruit of all his labors By Stephanie M. Mangino Winchester — On autumn afternoons in Winchester, the apple industry truly asserts itself. The fruit’s scent permeates the air as National Fruit Product Co. manufactures products ranging from juice to cider to applesauce. New faces appear, in the form of migrant workers who have arrived to pull apples from the gnarled branches of area trees. Local farm markets and orchards overflow with the fruit. White paper bags filled with a multitude of varieties wait for consumers to pick them up, as other apple products — cider doughnuts and pies, for example — also beckon. Philip B. Glaize Jr. of Winchester knows harvest time well. Now 50, he officially entered the family apple business — Fred L. Glaize L.C., of which he is president — when he was 23 years old, after he graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in plant and soil science and a minor in business. The apple business is his life. His firm produces apples primarily for the fresh market, but it also grows some processing apples on its 650 acres of orchard land. *** But Glaize’s devotion to the industry doesn’t stop at his business. Over the years, he has taken his concerns and those of his industry to leaders in Washington. Every year, he attends two meetings devoted to bringing the industry to the attention of national legislators, another two on the state level (dealing with research dollars and legislation), makes three or four visits to Capitol Hill to talk to congressional representatives, and also makes a couple of personal calls on legislators in Richmond. He has been deeply involved in promoting the industry, and has served on the boards of the Virginia Apple Growers Association and the Frederick County Fruit Growers Association, and is a past board chairman of the Vienna-based U.S. Apple Association, which represents 9,000 growers around the nation. Glaize, who is still Virginia’s representative to U.S. Apple, takes other state growers to visit key senators and representatives every spring. “He is a wonderful ambassador for the apple industry,” said U.S. Apple spokesman Shannon Shaffer. Glaize has testified before Congress about issues ranging from the Central American Free Trade Agreement to immigration, he said. “He is always there to answer the call for the greater good of the industry,” Shaffer said, adding that he also has a talent for keeping the industry on the radar screens of federal and state officials. *** Glaize said he believes the apple industry is truly heard in the nation’s capital, particularly through the efforts of U.S. Apple. “We do an amazing job for what little money we spend,” he said. Personal visits are the way to get things done, added Diane Kearns, Frederick County Fruit Growers Association president and treasurer of the area’s largest orchard concern, Fruit Hill Orchards. “It’s got to be a real, live person sitting there, talking.” Most recently, Glaize went to Staunton to offer testimony at the House Committee on Agriculture’s farm bill field hearing. He said he was exposed to such activism early in his career, so it has always felt right to be an advocate for the industry. It has also been worth the effort. “The work you do on the national level does come back to benefit you,” he said. The work takes the form of legislation favorable to the industry, and it also creates relationships among growers nationwide, Glaize said on a recent afternoon in his Piccadilly Street office. Earlier that day, he had talked by telephone with a Washington state grower who was having trouble handling his harvest because needed workers could not enter the country, Glaize said. Hearing about other growers’ problems and successes helps him and others to better market and improve their crops, he said. *** The Washington orchardist’s predicament also lies close to the heart of one of the most important issues in the apple industry — and that of agriculture as a whole — immigration. Winchester-area growers have traditionally used the H-2A Temporary Foreign Agricultural Worker Program for harvest labor, and Glaize said the industry does back efforts to expand the program. However, he said the industry has never looked to direct government subsidies to keep it alive. Rather, it has encouraged the use of approaches such as the market access program, in which growers match government money dollar-for-dollar to pay for promotional materials that eventually open markets such as Central America to U.S. apples, Glaize said. The federal government also purchases apples from U.S. growers that are then donated to schools. The program not only provides a nutritious snack for students, but it also creates a demand for apples, Glaize said. As long as the industry needs to have a connection to the government, “You’ve got to have the Phils of the world,” Kearns said. Demand is central to the success of the industry. While U.S. Apple has a legislative arm, it also focuses on education, through which information about apples and their benefits is distributed in an effort to increase interest in and demand for the fruit, Glaize said. *** The apple industry has not had an easy time in recent years, as supermarket ownership consolidated and put buying power in fewer hands, Glaize said. At the same time, cheap apple juice concentrate from China started coming into the country, which led to lower prices for processing apples, he said. Processing apple prices affect the fresh market, because their prices basically set the floor for everything else. One of Glaize’s appearances before federal legislators came in 2003, when he testified before a House committee about the impact of Chinese apple juice concentrate on U.S. growers. But even China, which produces four times the number of apples the U.S. does, has also suffered recently. The supply of the fruit is massive, with worldwide production doubling between 1991 and 2001, he said. In the U.S. however, Glaize sees some positive movement. This year’s prices for fresh fruit are better than last year’s, and those were better than the year before. He has also started to notice improvements in prices for processing apples. Apple shippers have started to consolidate somewhat, and the resulting reduction in competition may have helped to strengthen prices, Glaize said. He likens the industry to a hospital patient in recovery from a particularly bad stretch. “I hope we’re out of ICU,” he said with a grin. “It’s going to take a little while to be healthy again, but we can get there.” *** And Glaize will continue going to Washington, testifying, and working on the industry’s behalf. He doesn’t plan to stop, but said he would step aside if the time came for someone younger to learn what needs to be done. In the meantime, he’ll keep on growing his apples. Even though being an orchardist isn’t easy, Glaize has some good reasons for staying in the business — he’s happy his land is in open space, and he likes the people in the apple business. But there’s more for the man whose office features an apple poster and a large photo of his two children happily playing — apples in hand — when they were little. (They’re now 20 and 22 years old.) “I love the lifestyle,” he said. “I like producing a healthy product.”
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