Agribusiness

By Michelle Vachon, staff writer

One word best illustrates what has happened in agriculture over the last four decades: agribusiness.

Since the 1950s, agriculture has gone high-tech in Collier County. Growers use four-wheel drives, carry cellular phones and desktop computers.

Produce sales are done by faxes and modem, and today's growers follow international trade news as closely as weather reports.

"Today, Immokalee is the center of the farming activity," said Norman Herren, who was president and chief executive officer for Collier Development Corp. and its affiliates. But this was not always the case, he said.

When Barron G. Collier had completed the Tamiami Trail in 1928, agriculture started to develop in the southern portion of the county, the Ochopee and the Copeland areas, said Herren.

Produce was transported by rail and trucks, which were refrigerated with ice from an Everglades City plant, he said. But the soil layer was so thin on top of the rocky surface that rain would wash fields away. This prompted growers to move to the Immokalee area in the 1930s, said Herren.

Today, agribusiness sales in Collier County fluctuate between $250 to $300 million each year, with an economic impact on the county nearing $900 million.

Collier County is Florida's biggest tomato producer. More than half of the county's annual sales comes from tomatoes, followed by peppers and citrus.

Small farms are a thing of the past in this area, Dewey Oliver Gargiulo has said. He is the founder of Gargiulo L.P., which operates in five states, Puerto Rico and Chile, out of its Naples headquarters.

"The players have become bigger, the smaller ones have either merged or become larger - the trend is in the international integration of companies," said Gargiulo.

Growing methods have changed, said Clark Ansley, who was chief financial officer for Collier Co. For instance, irrigation has turned highly specialized - going from flooding in the 1950s to today's drip irrigation, he said. Barron Collier Co. waters its citrus groves with computerized systems.

In addition, farmers cover tomato beds with plastic sheets in order to increase their control over growing conditions, said Ansley.

The application of catch-all types of pesticides has been replaced by the combined use of beneficial insects and more environment-friendly chemicals, Philip A. Stansly has said. He is associate professor of entomology for the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) in Immokalee. Now called integrated pest management (IPM), this too has become a science.

In the last 40 years, urban development in Collier County has claimed a vast expanse of land that was previously farmed.

Since the area continues to grow at an unprecedented speed, more agricultural acreage will be threatened in the years to come.

But, for the time being, agribusiness is an important component of Collier County's economic landscape.

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