Inaba Produce Farms is a large, family-run operation in the arid Yakima Valley that grows, packs and ships a diverse variety of vegetables throughout the region. The Inabas have been experimenting with organic methods in an effort to improve the farm’s diversity and to reduce their dependence on chemical inputs. It is not an easy transition to make, but Inaba family farmers have survived challenges here before.

“We farm about 1200 acres, and it’s a family operation,” says third generation farmer, Lon Inaba. “I have two brothers: Wayne is our salesman, he’s the money guy; Norm is our computer guy, he has a degree in economics and computer sciences, and does our payroll and taxes. My mom is 75-years-old and she is our office manager: she pays the bills, collects the money, does the shipping papers, and keeps us all in line.” Lon himself is the engineer, innovating and developing new things. He builds the greenhouses, drip irrigation systems, and composting operations.

Inaba Farms is made up of wide, flat fields, broken only by power lines and the occasional road. The surrounding hills are faintly visible in the distance. It is not hard to imagine the sagebrush country this once was. It takes several minutes for Lon to drive the entire length of a compost windrow in one of the fields. “We have about five miles of compost windrow,” Lon remarks. “We started composting as a way to build up our ground. We’ve used manure and cover cropping for probably the last 25 years; my grandfather used those practices almost 100 years ago.” Utilizing their waste products in the compost pile helps the Inabas reduce their chemical use.

Lon speaks familiarly about the relatives who worked this land over the last century. “My grandfather came from Japan in 1907 to the Yakima Valley because this was one of the last areas still in sagebrush and they were asking people to immigrate here to help break and farm the ground,” he says. His grandfather broke 120 acres out of sagebrush, some of the ground they farm today. Lon continues, “My grandfather was doing pretty well, but then the 20s came around and they passed the alien land law that said that undesirable aliens couldn’t own or rent land.” Lon’s grandfather was reduced to sharecropping, and could no longer afford to rotate high value crops with soil-enriching hay. He had to move every couple years when the soil was worn out. This forced him to look for a high margin crop that he could justify with fewer acres, which is how the family got into the vegetable business.

Lon recounts, “They had moved to eight or ten different places before my dad’s cousin was old enough to sign for land. And by that time World War II came around and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and there was a lot of animosity toward the Japanese people.” This time world events meant that Lon’s grandfather, father and mother had to move to an internment camp for several years. He says, “So we’ve seen adversity, and we can relate to our workers, most of whom are Hispanic migrants. Just like my grandparents, they gave up everything they had to come to this country to try and make a living.”

Lon left an engineering job to come back to the farm 20 years ago, when his dad decided he wanted to get into packing and selling his produce on his own. Lon recalls, “I took a six-month leave of absence to help build a cooler and a warehouse and I have been here ever since. I did more actual engineering during my first three weeks home on the farm than I had done in the previous three years!”

In 1982, the farm consisted of three crops: concord grapes, bell peppers and sweet corn. Today the Inabas produce nearly 20 different crops. “We try to do everything from start to finish and have something the consumer can put on their table,” explains Lon. “In our business the margins are pretty slim. If you take what the consumer pays and divide by about five, that’s about what the grower actually gets. People don’t realize that. We have to be vertically integrated to make this work financially. ” The Inabas grow their own vegetable starts in greenhouses and have their own packaging plant. Merchants can come to the farm to pick up four or five things at a time and that helps them attract customers.

The Inabas farm both organically and conventionally; with about 10 to 15 percent of their crops in organic production. Lon says, “We do a little bit of almost everything organic. We’re pretty diverse to begin with and the organic thing makes us more diverse. We sell to major retailers in the Pacific Northwest and to a few throughout the western United States and Canada. The organic deal gives us more specialty items to sell.”

The harvest season begins in April with asparagus, before they move into cabbage, peas, green beans, cucumbers, yellow squash, zucchini, and then sweet corn, bell peppers, watermelons, tomatoes, and eggplants. Lon explains, “Our workforce is about 150 to 200 people and probably two-thirds of the same people come back every year. We get good people, and we try and take care of them.” Inaba Farms has built quality housing for migrant workers and has even developed housing sites among the fields that they lease for a nominal fee to some of their most valued employees.

Lon also works to make sure Inaba Farms is a good place for insect families. “Squashes, cucumbers, and watermelon are crops that need bees for pollination,” explains Lon. “As we started adding those crops, we started looking at using less harsh chemicals in the remainder of our crops so we wouldn’t kill the bees.” Lon also is concerned about the health of his workers in regards to these chemicals. He says, “My dad taught us: you treat people the way you want to be treated. If we don’t want to spray or work around chemicals, we don’t want our workers to either.”

After the Inabas tried numerous organically-certified chemicals, most to no avail, they decided to try different management practices and beneficial insects. Lon explains, “In on our organic fields, we’re trying to be diverse in our cropping structure and diverse in our management practices. I try to release beneficial insects early so we have second and third generations of these insects throughout the growing season. I release lacewings, parasitic wasps, midges, and ladybugs. Hopefully they won’t fly away. Hopefully when we have a problem they’ll be there to eat the undesirable guys.” Lon creates habitat for beneficial insects by walking through his fields and tossing handfuls of clover, alfalfa, yarrow, corn, wheat, and dill seed, hoping to garner diversity in the pollen and nectar sources for those insects he has released in his fields, as well as attracting other beneficial insects.

Lon seems to relish the challenges of farming with fewer chemicals, but it clearly is not easy. He says, “A lot of the stuff we’re doing for organics we do on faith because there is no instant result. You have to hope the beneficial bugs will stick around and that the decisions you make are going to be good – there is no instant verification of your results. I do a little bit of a lot of different things – the diversity approach – and hope that some of those things are working. And if you get the right conditions, one thing might work great and something else might not at all.”