New WSHA President Steve Zediker Focused On Future

Steve Zediker Washington State Horticultural AssociationSteve Zediker is living proof that just because you can take the boy off the farm, you can’t necessarily take the farming out of the boy.

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Zediker, the president of the Washington State Horticultural Association’s (WSHA) Board of Directors for 2014, grew up on a farm in Peshastin, WA, where he spent a lot of time with his father. But his father died when he was 16, and the farm was sold.

After graduating from high school — with a class of 30 —  Zediker decided he needed a different career. Besides, he already knew plenty of horticulture from his father, so at Washington State University he majored in Agricultural Economics. After graduation, he took a job with Farm Credit Services, where he worked his way up the ranks from loan officer to branch manager.
But he still had the farming bug, so after three or four years as a banker, he bought a farm in the Sunnyside area. He couldn’t afford to quit his day job, though.

“I basically had two jobs for seven or eight years,” he says. “If you want something, you have to sacrifice you can’t just have it handed to you.”

Full-Time Gig

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In 1990, his grandfather on his mother’s side retired, and Steve decided to lease land from him and leave Farm Credit Services. It was a decision he never regretted, especially today. “I have friends who went to work when I did and they are retiring. I’m certainly not, I can’t even imagine it,” he says. “I enjoy what I do — I just don’t see myself kicking back on a beach.”

Today, Zediker Orchards of Prosser covers 240 acres. It’s now a bit of a misnomer, because most of it’s in vineyards. Zediker grows 150 acres of juice grapes, Concord and Niagara, for Welch Foods. There’s another 78 acres of apples and 12 acres of pears. He started out with just the apples and pears, and only added the grapes when a neighbor died.

“It doesn’t yield huge profits, but it’s steady,” he says of the juice grapes. “That was my rationale — diversification.”

Tradition Of Duty

As for why he became active in WSHA, Zediker says he’s always considered it one of the duties of being a fruit grower.

“My dad was active in industry committees. My dad’s dad was active in industry committees,” he says. “I guess I just think of it as being part of the business.”

Not that the business hasn’t changed. As recently as the 1990s, 40 bins of apples to the acre was considered reasonable. Today, 80 bins per acre is the benchmark. Among other improvements is the change in varieties. In the late 1990s the industry was heavy on Red Delicious, which wouldn’t have been so bad if they were crunchy and flavorful.

“We got a reputation for Reds that didn’t taste good,” he said. “They were just an inferior product.”
Complicating matters was the fact that they didn’t yet have MCP so they would pick the fruit on the green side for long-term storage.

“We don’t pick things based on how they will store, we pick them so they taste good,” he says, adding that’s a critical factor in such a cyclical business. “Even though we have a lot of apples to move, we have a much better product than we had in the last downturn.”

Industry Needs

Because the business has changed so much, Zediker says as WSHA president he’d like to see a study done on the industry’s demographics.

“What we think we have, we can quantify with numbers,” he says. “We need to get a sense of what the makeup is, and even more important, what are their needs?”

For example, Zediker would like to know what growers want when they go to the annual conference. Perhaps the association should be offering certifications in new areas, such as how to treat water so that it meets the mandates of the Food Safety Modernization Act.

“Is that the venue to issue such a certificate?” he wonders. “We need to know because requirements are changing, and paradigms are shifting.”

A Word Of Advice

“Tenacity.”

If Steve Zediker, the 2014 chief of the Washington State Horticultural Association, could give a word of advice to a young fruit grower just starting out, that would be it.

“It’s the same advice I would give my sons in any business,” he says. “It’s not going to be easy, so tenacity is essential because the best intentions sometimes go to hell.”

Also, watch the industry leaders. Listen, process, and act. How do adults learn? By making mistakes.
“A lot of the most important things we learn by screwing up,” he says. “The industry leaders have just made more good decisions than bad, and that’s why they’re successful.”

Zediker and his wife of 32 years, Ruth, have two sons, both of whom work in agriculture. Their oldest, 27-year-old Adam, works as an area manager for Washington Fruit and Produce. “He and I talk farming almost every day,” says Steve.

Their youngest, 23-year-old Scott, got a degree last year in viticulture and enology from Washington State University, and recently completed an internship with E & J Gallo. Their 25-year-old daughter, Stephanie, is a nurse at the University of Washington Hospital in Seattle. Coincidentally, just like
her dad started out, her husband works at Farm Credit Services. “It’s funny,” Steve Zediker says,
“he’s taking a career path similar to what I did.”

All three kids were given the same instructions when they were young children.
“One thing my wife and I told the kids early on, that their first five years out of college — and
they would go to college — they couldn’t come back to the farm,” says Zediker. “Get some experience working in the outside world, and after that, you can decide if this is the place for you.”

A Single Voice

One other issue Steve Zediker is looking forward to tackling is the consolidation of Washington’s four tree fruit organizations. It just makes sense, he says, as the industry itself has consolidated. First it was the retailers, as grocers began swallowing each other up to the point that now six mega-chains control 60% of the U.S. market. Then it was the grower-shippers, especially in Northwest tree fruit, where the largest 10 to 12 marketing organizations are now responsible for more than 90% of sales.
The four organizations, whose top administrators and board chairmen formed a committee and have been meeting to discuss a possible merger, are: the Washington Growers Clearing House Association, the Wenatchee Valley Traffic Association, the Yakima Valley Growers-Shippers Association, and the WSHA.

The idea of consolidating the four organizations that serve the tree fruit industry was first broached publicly at the WSHA’s annual meeting in December 2011 by the outgoing president, West Mathison, head of Stemilt Growers, Inc. Like Mathison, Zediker believes that consolidation would eliminate redundancy.

Zediker says there’s no question there’s duplication of duties among the four groups, each of which was formed decades ago. For example, the other three organizations all are involved in tracking product movement and gathering pricing data.

But most important of all, Zediker believes that one consolidated organization would be much more effective than the sum of the four. “Though we’re the biggest apple growers, when the industry is looked at as a whole, we’re a niche (in the food business),” he says. “We need a unified voice, especially in our lobbying efforts.”

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