The 2024 Retailer of the Year is Buttonwillow Warehouse Company, which serves farmers from Modesto to Oxnard, California. Chief Operating Officer Clay Houchin, who is second generation leadership for the family-owned independent ag retailer, shares the business has evolved greatly in the past 60 years to meet the needs of farmers on the lastest episode of The Scoop Podcast.
One of the most pressing issues facing California growers is water usage. Houchin says he could see how in the next five years, 40% of acres could be idled due to availability and cost of water.
And while that may seem daunting, he has belief in how agriculture can face the challenges.
“We in California have the safest–and I hate to use this word–most sustainable food production in the world,” Houchin says. “These growers are incredibly resilient. They’re exceptionally smart business people.”
Transformation is nothing new to California agriculture nor the business at Buttonwillow.
After starting the company, founder Don Houchin then helped farmers navigate the transition from row crops to fresh produce crops and permanent crops. Today it’s footprint includes strawberries, blueberries, table grapes, wine grapes, pistachios, almonds, dairy customers with forage crops, and fresh market citrus.
This meant changes in everything from horsepower in the field to the crop care applied.
“You shift from growing fiber and crops that are going to be fed to animals, to more towards what is going directly into human consumption. And so the sense of urgency goes up. Your care and custody of that crop is intensified, and also the risks and the value of those crops are substantially higher,” Clay says. “So our people had to be better. They had to be able to be moved quicker, because those crops tend to move quicker. One day the crop could be fine, and within 48 hours, you’re needing to do an application to get in there.”
Another force that has elevated the level of detail applied to the agronomics is California state regulations.
“There’s no state or no place in the world where every application is documented and submitted to the government and is also submitted to the processor,” he says. “For every EPA registered crop protection product that is put on that crop there’s a written legal recommendation, it’s given to the grower, the application is done, and then it is filed with the state, and that goes with the food, and it is logged on that acre for years to come.”
He says the record keeping means you can go back decades now and see every pesticide applied to an acre.
“Along with pesticides, came water, because water is a very precious resource here,” he says. “Irrigation monitors log every inch of water that’s going on. And with that now fertilizer, because nitrogen is kind of the hot topic in California, so we have to make sure that we’re applying nitrogen judiciously, efficiently, and we also have to report that to the state.”
Houchin shares more on his outlook as well as tools the company has used to better serve farmers and meet regulations on The Scoop Podcast.
You can read more about Buttonwillow Warehouse Company here.
