Albert Wada

 

I interviewed Albert Wada of Wada Farms. I know Albert because he is a good friend of my fathers and is buying my dads potato farm this coming season. Albert came from a humble background, his father was a small beat farmer of about 49 acres. Albert was a car mechanic but saw vision in buying his fathers land and expanding. He didn’t have much money but slowly bought out what his father had in land. Albert now farms more than 30,000 acres and has ventures with Dole, Category, and Idhoan Foods. He has two multi-million dollar packing facilities where most of these products are made.

            Albert feels lucky that he got into farming when it wasn’t so expensive. Today it is harder to start your own business in this area. He explained how there is a lot of overhead costs to farming. Land today is nearly 15 times the price of what he first bought his fathers 49 acres for. Equipment to plant and harvest can be very expensive. One new combine can cost up to four hundred thousand dollars. He explained to me how a lot of these farmers that have expanded are getting older and starting to retire, so there is a good opportunity for those that have an in into farming. Albert is now 68 and is planning to officially retire soon and have his sons continue the business.

            I asked Albert about the pains and the trails that he had to overcome over the years and he could tell me about many. He talked about how he started off so small with only one tractor and equipment that was rented. He had very long hours and did all the farm work by himself. He was barely scraping by for the first five years. After his fifth year he had built up enough capital to buy his own equipment and that very next year potato prices were up. This helped him build a rainy day account for when potato prices were not so hot. He says that farming is a major risk because it takes so much money to prepare the ground and to buy fertilizer, that if a crop or the prices are bad it can destroy the operation. He knows of many farmers who didn’t make it and have had to do something else because they couldn’t survive during the bad years. He claims that he took a major risk and it paid off. Even today they risk millions each year as they farm so much land.

            He has learned so much from his successes and his failures. He knows the importance of saving and planning in the good years to overcome the bad ones. He broke a farming norm when he built his own packing plant in 1992. He was the first grower/shipper with a packing facility. The facility was more than 12 million dollars to build, but has paid of immensely. He cut out the middleman and has been successful in multiple operations that happen in the facility. They mostly dehydrate and package the potatoes to make things such as instant mashed potatoes, hash browns, and easy bakers that are similar to twice baked potato’s. In 1994 they became an official supplier of Dole for potatoes and sweet potatoes. Albert told me that you always have to be open to new ideas and ways to get yourself out on the market. He first came in contact with some of the directors of Dole when he was on a vacation in Hawaii. It was mere coincidence that he happened to be staying in the same hotel as them, but he made the most out of that opportunity.

            Although He is getting ready to retire and for the last decade has done more of the executive part of the business, he still remembers the long hard sweaty 14 hour days that brought him to where he is today.