Wahtcom County Raspberries

My Great Grandpa brought his family to Lynden, Washington from Van Buren, Missouri to berry farm many years ago. My Grandma Mary's brother, my Great Uncle Bobby took over Rhea farms and produced raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, cucumbers, carrots, and green beans in Whatcom county. I wanted to write this blog about my families history in farming food after reading Ozeki's book "All Over Creation" and watching "The Future of Food."
Along with many other berry farmers in Whatcom County, Great Uncle Bobby became an early investor Bellingham Cold Storage. Not very long ago I found out he probably made more money investing in that company than he did selling his crops.
I have lots of memories of his farms and his boxing facilities. One of the earliest was watching the conveyor belt move the raspberries down the line to be boxed. All of the workers wore Rhea Farms blue coats. My cousins lived next to the farm. The crops were rotated and so one time they lived next to carrots, and the next time cucumbers. We ate raw cucumbers with Lawrey's seasoning salt and carrots right out of the ground. Small one's, big one's, we didn't even wash the dirt off, we just wiped it off with our shirts.
Bobby's son-in-law was working with him for a while, but left because at that time raspberry farming wasn't as profitable. I'm writing this blog from Bellingham, I came home this weekend from Seattle. On the front page of the Bellingham Herald, "Cold dims harvest prospects" was the article title. There will be a reduction in strawberry, blueberry and cherry crop yield because cold stunted the growth. Also in the article, Whatcom County raspberries, about 50 million pounds on average, accounts for 65 percent of the total U.S. production. Crop yield also was down for a few years when my cousins and I rode dirt bikes and ate our way through the rows of fruit. Just Kidding!
My Mom picked berries in the fields. My Sister and I picked berries when we were kids. It was good work experience and you met a lot of people from the area. Someone in our class commented on one of the first days how they heard how important bee's are to our eco-system. We drove our motorbikes by crates of bees which were next to the raspberry fields. They didn't bother you if you didn't bother them, but this is the first time I'll admit we threw a rock at the crates just to see what would happen. We took off pretty fast after that. Apparently the bees were for honny, which I knew at that time, but also for pollinating, which I didn't know back then. In the Herald article, "the cold has deterred bees from pollinating her cherry trees' blossoms. Nearly 60 years old Kathy uses a ladder to crawl up to the lower branches and pollinate the blossoms herself with a feather duster!"
I'm conscious of the impact of lack of food on societies presently from watching the news. I'm aware of the importance of the future of food because of my families farming history, producing food by farming, packaging and distribution and after studying our class's media outlets on the future of food.