28 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JANUARY 4-10, 2024 www.montereycountyweekly.com FACE TO FACE Eat a strawberry or a blueberry out of a grocery store clamshell, and you are tasting J. Miles Reiter’s life’s work. While he has for decades been largely out of the fields, where he began as a farmer, he has spent a large portion of his career overseeing Driscoll’s, a global leader in the industry. The company has patented berry varieties that are now the defining size, color and flavor we think of when we think “berry.” They work with nearly 1,000 growers in 22 countries—from right outside the Driscoll’s headquarters in Watsonville to Mexico to Peru to China—to supply strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries. Reiter grew up in a berry farming family in the Pajaro Valley, and became chairman of the board of Driscoll’s in 1988. He served as CEO from 200015, then again from 2018-2023. Soren Bjorn took over as CEO on Jan. 1; Reiter will remain involved as executive chairman and his family remains the majority owner. Weekly: We started by talking water. How much of your attention as CEO is on water versus other issues? Reiter: We have initiated a formal element in our corporate strategies that we call More Berries With Less Resources. That could be water, fertilizer, human labor. You always are trying to be more efficient. There are a lot of other things to worry about in this business, too. Like what? Are your people motivated? Are your leaders the kind of leaders that can inspire their people and have the wisdom to make good decisions? We have a clear mission, value statement and vision, and we take those things really seriously. If that appears to be insincere, you may as well get it off the walls. It’s OK to have no mission, but don’t have one you don’t mean. What about the fruit itself? I feel like we get a little bit of a freebie on things like health—you’d be able to read nothing and understand that berries are healthy. My biggest thing is, do they taste good enough? What is your personal take as a consumer of berries? Of course I have my own opinions, and they tend to track with what’s working for the business. With strawberries, I like them juicy. There’s a look I like, I must admit—a smooth skin. If the seeds are sunken, that berry is going to be mushy, or too hard and dry. If I’m eating in the field, I always eat from the outside of the bed. I prefer two-row beds to three-row beds, because more berries are exposed. The berries—not just the plants, but the berries themselves—like sunlight. What about other types of berries? In some ways, raspberries are closest to my heart. They’re expensive to grow, expensive to pick—they force you to make choices. But if you get it right, a really good raspberry is pretty special. It’s an elegant kind of taste. New genetics have completely transformed the expectations of blueberries. I really like it; they are bigger, and have crunchier skins. I am very suspicious of big blueberries. I get nervous they won’t have a good texture. Some of them don’t, and it depends on the growing region—they need to have a strong skin structure. There’s nothing worse than a mushy blueberry. You’ve been out of the day-to-day farming business now for quite a while. For almost half of my career, I was farming myself, running our farms here and starting up our Mexican farms. I liked being a farmer. I miss it in a lot of ways, other ways not so much. What do you miss? I liked being outdoors, I liked the people. And there’s always a puzzle. You’re never done learning. The best growers are in their field a lot, so they notice small differences and they act quickly to adjust. What will you do in retirement? I like being outdoors, I fly fish. And I pay quite a lot of attention to my vegetable garden—it’s sort of an odd thing to do, since we’re farming hundreds of millions of plants. I have really good asparagus. Tomatoes are always frustrating. I like growing garlic. I could always see better how plants react to light in my vegetable garden than I could on my farm. It made me even more adamant about getting our growers to at least try lower densities. A lot of people’s thought process is, “How many plants can I put in before it screws me up?” instead of, “How few can I put in before wasting space?” Sometimes there isn’t a big difference, but it’s a different way of thinking. Berry Sweet Two-time Driscoll’s CEO Miles Reiter retires after decades of innovating the modern berry industry. By Sara Rubin As a fourth-generation berry farmer, Miles Reiter says sustainable practices matter. “I think it’s unconscionable to use up the resources in a generation or two, or many.” DRISOLL’S COPYRIGHT 2023 For helping us meet our MC Gives! goal through your generous support. carmelart.org Wednesday through Monday, 10am to 5pm
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