While a lot of farmers talk about the need to be vertically integrated, the Sakuma Brothers have fully embraced this concept. They still sell fresh strawberries, raspberries and blueberries at a market stand during the summer months, but that represents only a tiny fraction of their business today. Over three generations, the Sakuma family has built a small fruit business that operates in two states and includes a farm, a research and development laboratory, a wholesale and retail nursery operation, and a commercial fruit processing and packaging plant.

Steve Sakuma is the current president of Sakuma Brothers. His grandparents immigrated to Bainbridge Island from Japan in the early 1900s and set to work, farming and raising ten children. Steve’s father, the first of his grandparents’ children, helped the family take products to Pike Place market, terminal markets, and a processing facility, all a ferry ride away. The return was little more than a hand to mouth existence, but it was enough to feed the family of 12. In 1935, a window of opportunity opened. The cannery in Seattle to which they delivered their strawberries sponsored the Sakuma's move to Skagit County. It was an opportunity to own land, to farm, and to be more independent inside what was emerging as a very corporate economic system.

In 1941, with part of the family in Bainbridge and part in Skagit County, the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. The family, like all Japanese families in the region, was driven out of the community, first in Bainbridge and then in Skagit Valley. The latter evacuation permitted them to get things in order, including a power of attorney and a caretaker for the land.

At the end of the war, the Sakuma family returned to their farmland, but they had lost their land in Bainbridge. They were able to retain their land in the Valley, however, and started farming again in 1945. With a new sense of purpose, they took to the fields and began selling strawberry fruits and plants. The family wanted to start a nursery but to be a certified nursery requires that two fields lie fallow for every one in production, and that much land was hard to come by in the Skagit Valley. To expand, Steve’s father and uncles moved the strawberry nursery operation to northern California in the 1960s.

In Washington, the Sakuma family expanded into raspberries and blueberries. Steve recalls, “In the late 80s and early 90s, all the processing facilities for small fruit in Skagit County just went away, they couldn’t make it. The paradigm of agriculture was changing at that point: if you weren’t a grower and a processor, the future wasn’t there.” In 1990 the Sakuma Brothers built a processing building for a company from Oregon; in 1997 when the company left the family bought the equipment. With the addition of the processing operation, the vertical integration was complete, but they didn’t stop there.

Having a small fruit research lab means that Sakuma Brothers are on the cutting edge of propagation technology, relentlessly pursuing disease- and virus-resistant alternatives that provide high yield and superior fruit. The whole package is unique in the small fruit industry, and it means that the Sakuma Family Farm is a player in national and even international markets. “It’s still the structure of a family business, just multiplied over time,” explains Steve.

The process begins with the potential customer, taking them into the lab and showing them where the nursery operation starts, then out to the fields, and eventually back to the processing plant. It gives the potential customer insight into a few things, Steve explains: “We are here to stay, we are invested in this operation, and we have the potential to grow.”

In Washington, Sakuma Brothers currently harvest 160 acres of strawberries, 300 acres of conventional and organic raspberries, 300 acres of conventional and organic blueberries, 57 acres of apples, and a fledgling conventional and organic blackberry business. “It’s apparent to us that if you really want to work the entire market, you’ve got to be in both conventional and organic,” explains Steve. “We have found that organic really supports conventional and conventional supports organic. We wouldn’t have been able to take on organic if we weren’t reasonably good at conventional farming because you’ve got to have a basis for it. And now we have found that what we have learned organic farming is strengthening our conventional farming.”

Steve is proud of the success of this business model, but not perhaps for the reasons that one might expect. “What is really important to us at a corporate level is our family legacy,” he says. “The business is very important, but the reason the family name comes before the business is the family is more important than our business. We believe if we take care of the family, the business will follow. It’s worked through two generations.” In 2004 the company brought on their first fourth generation member, Steve’s son. A cousin from the third generation also joined the ranks as the first woman at the corporate director level in their company. Steve explains, “Our family was pretty male dominated in the second generation, but as we looked down into the fourth generation it became very apparent to us that if we didn’t recruit our daughters and nieces, we wouldn’t be able to maintain a family business.”

Recruiting and training family members to carry on the business has become more complicated than it used to be. “When we were kids,” Steve recalls, “if you were three years old and you were old enough to stand up, you would go out in the field. We grew up out in the field.” Now child labor laws restrict children under the age of 12 working in the fields. However, farm families are  able to have their own children work on the farm. “It gives us an opportunity to establish what we believe is the right work ethic,” explains Steve.

The Sakuma’s values include choosing at the corporate level to take an active leadership role in sustaining agriculture. Steve has served as the president of Skagitonians to Preserve Farmland, sits on the Agriculture Association Board, and is a drainage commissioner in his district. “We believe that if agriculture is going to be sustained in this valley we have got to participate,” he says. “We have to be part of that education process; we have to be sure the right decisions are being made by county, state and federal officials.”

Most of the fourth generation Sakumas are now in college, and time will tell if they choose the path that has been forged for them. The family’s values of hard work and loyalty are firmly ingrained in the older generations. “Our business is based on the assumption that we are going to be here well into the future,” states Steve. “Because of our parents we have what we have. Now it is up to us to take what was given to us and increase it to the point where we can pass it on to the next generation.”