June 2, 2000

The Comeback Kid...
Vegetables once flourished in East Texas... now they're making a comeback!

By Lana Robinson
Field Editor

Vegetable production once flourished in East Texas, and it will again, if food distributor Murphy George of William George Company in Lufkin has his way. George is banking on the grower expertise of a young, Cherokee County farmer, Andy Lindsey of Alto, to stage a comeback using plastic mulch and drip irrigation.

“You can’t grow a good crop year in and year out in East Texas without irrigation,” George insists. “When people see that they can be successful growing crops this way, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of this done here.”

The level of success Lindsey achieved on his own in 1999 convinced George that with a little fine-tuning to make the operation more efficient, and the benefit of his marketing/distribution company, they could hit a home run.

“I’ve known Andy for a long time, his father and his grandfather. He’s a high-tech farmer. He had a big crop of tomatoes last year. I came out and saw all those 5-gallon pickle buckets on the ground, and immediately saw that his labor situation needed to change. I told him we needed to build a packing shed, dock high where trucks could back up, a forklift, and we needed to palletize in the field. And that’s what we did,” said George. “We’re real proud of it.”

A&M Packing Company
George and Lindsey call their new partnership the A&M Packing Company (not connected to Texas A&M University). The new 9,000-square foot facility, complete with a tomato grading machine and a 40-pallet capacity cooler, is located three miles south of Alto on Highway 69. Just across the highway, behind a fortress of trees, 40,000 tomato plants and various other crops thrive on 250 acres, 40 acres of which are under drip irrigation.

“It’s a vine-ripe deal, no gas. We’re going for the taste,” says Lindsey, a third-generation, Cherokee County farmer. “Tomatoes are the main crop, but we’re experimenting with other crops, like seedless watermelons, cantaloupes, peas and beans. We’re harvesting yellow squash and cucumbers now.”

“We’re looking for the crop that makes the most money,” adds George, noting that they have planted two popular, high-dollar items, jalapeno and poblano peppers, which command 50-80 cents a pound and about 80 cents a pound, respectively, year-round.

Special equipment forms the beds, lays the drip lines, installs the plastic, punches holes, and plants the crop. Lindsey pumps water from two newly-drilled wells into ponds and then into drip pipes that extend down each row of crops. He has been watering once a week since planting.

Lindsey pegged the cost of his irrigation system at $80,000 and the plastic, a recurring cost each season, at about $20,000. Sounds expensive, but he believes it is well worth the investment.

“I’ve had good luck with the drip irrigation. Tomatoes are doing super on it. This is the first year I’ve tried squash on it,” says Lindsey, who became acquainted with the plastic and drip technology during a brief farming stint in South Texas about a decade ago.

The moisture availability and retention, plus the better weed control afforded by the system, are advantages George is hopeful more local farmers will explore.

“I’d really like to see a comeback in production. I can remember a time, when my father was in the business, that we had tomato packing sheds in Jacksonville, Maydelle, and other points in East Texas, and shipped vegetables and melons in rail cars,” George recalls.

Today, William George Company, founded by George’s father and now operated by the third generation of Georges, has distribution centers in Lufkin, Texarkana and Palestine.

“We stay out of the metropolitan areas. We service a 150-mile radius of our distribution centers. These particular regions are our niche,” he notes. “We’ve got Brookshire Brothers in Tyler and Lufkin that use a tremendous amount of product, and we have outlets in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. So I think we (A&M Packing Company) can market all the product we can grow.”

So far, the men are pleased with the crops’ progress. George holds out a tomato, beams and says, “This is the earliest tomato you’ll find in East Texas. Early this spring, I told Andy, ‘There’s a risk in any business, and we need to take a risk.’ If you can get tomatoes early, they’ll make you some money. So we got 4,000 tomato plants from South Texas and planted them. Two weeks later, they were predicting a freeze. Andy put styrofoam cups over the plants and saved them. Then we put out 30,000 more plants and it threatened to freeze again. He covered up a good many of those, and fortunately, we didn’t lose any.”

However, surviving to fight another day is pretty much a given in vegetable production. In mid-May, Lindsey discovered thrips in his tomatoes, insects which often do damage in other tomato-growing regions, but have not been much of a problem here in the past.

Just one more bout along the road to success.