For years now I have wondered why Wally Smith discouraged my sister and I from becoming tree fruit growers. I believe I have found the answer. The answer is not an easy one to put into a few words, so I shall try to explain it with many words.
As a teenager, Wally dry land farmed with his own father in a town in southern Alberta called Steveville, a town which no longer exists. They had many crop failures due to lack of water.
As a young man Wally became a printer and bought a print shop in Carbon Alberta. Everything went well until the stock markets crashed during the Dirty Thirties and Wally lost his printing business. He and Auntie Kay and their two year old daughter packed up their stuff and moved to Oliver BC, where Wally bought raw land next to a creek now known as Park Rill. The creek guaranteed successful crops, something Wally learned from the Steveville experience.
Wally began to plant fruit trees and ran a small news paper paid for by advertisers and freely gave it away. He built a barn and bought a cow, built a chicken pen and bought chicks, and continued to plant trees.
Growing fruit isn’t just about picking it and selling it, there is a lot that goes before the picking and selling. Briefly there is the planting, weeding, protection from varmits like mice, gophers and beavers, spraying, pruning, thinning, fertilizing, and watering. The only thing that is constant is the watering and keeping the weeds down. Not to mention needing equipment and the gas to power that equipment. Everything takes some expenditure of money.
Wally joined the Oliver Co-operative Growers Association because it was cheaper and easier to send fruit to one facility where it could be sorted, packed, stored and then sold, than it was for all the smaller growers to set up their own facilities and act as their own marketing agents too.
To make the process even more complex, the trade unions got involved in organizing the packing house workers. Wally wrote a lot about the trade unions and their expectations of the fruit growers. This is where matters get difficult. If sawmill workers go on strike, the trees don’t rot while waiting for the strike to settle. If the packinghouse workers go on strike the fruit rots on the trees and the grower gets nothing, but if the union gets all what they want then the grower gets pennies for his product. The general public who buy the fruit will only pay just so much, so it becomes a balancing act as to who gets what and how much. Pay day for the grower who sends his fruit to the packing house doesn’t come until the fruit is sold to the customer, that being a food chain such as Safeway or IGA for example. When the fruit sits in Controlled Atmosphere storage, it may be there until February or March. To get a cash flow, Wally and Auntie Kay set up a drive in fruit stand, sold extra chicken eggs to towns people, Wally was paid to repair the Linotype at the Oliver Chronicle, and Auntie Kay would use her Registered Nursing experience to do special airplane flights to Vancouver with sick patients who needed emergency hospital care that only Vancouver could provide.
Altogether, tree fruit growing was not an easy life. In the spring during blossom time there was always the threat of frost, during cherry season there was always the threat of rain, in the fall there was always the threat of wind which would blow the fruit off the trees.
Forty years of growing fruit taught Wally that water was only one of his worries. He didn’t want his children to struggle the way he had to just to make a living.
Upon reflection, I think that most parents want a better life for their children than they had. When my sister and I approached him about running the farm he did his best to deflect our aspirations, and it worked, for neither of us are tree fruit growers. I must say there has never been a time where I had want or missed a meal because I hadn’t the money to pay for it. Wally and Auntie Kay’s sacrifice has given us four children a much easier financial life than they had. In spite of their struggles, I don’t think they enjoyed their lives any less than we have.