OBREGÓN, SONORA, Mexico — Strong and growing within Sonora’s thriving Yaqui Valley is Agricola Gutiérrez. The 20-year old company is owned by brothers Octavio and Ernesto Gutiérrez.

In recent years, the very close brothers have somewhat separated their entrepreneurial activities. But together they own produce packinghouses around Obregón as well as the produce marketing company, GreenPoint Distributing LLC, located in Rio Rico, AZ. GreenPoint was founded in November 2000 after an unprofitable season selling product through an independent distributor.

Ernesto owns 2,000 acres of vegetable farms and is a partner in a major produce distributing company based in Hermosillo. The company sells high-quality produce to northern Mexico’s largest retail chains. Octavio has expanded into cattle ranching, gas stations and shrimp farming. To the southwest of Obregón, Octavio operates 360 acres of shrimp farms along the coast of the Gulf of California.

In Obregón, Sonora is the food safety-certified vegetable packing house of Agricola Gutiérrez. Standing together are the facility’s owner, Ernesto Gutiérrez, with Omar Losolla, director of sales and marketing for GreenPoint Distributing LLC.The brothers are third-generation Sonora agriculturalists. Their father, Jesus Ruben Gutierrez, at age 87 remains an active wheat grower. “He bought new tractors this year,” Ernesto Gutiérrez said.

Ernesto indicated that 90 percent of agricultural land in the Yaqui Valley is planted in wheat. The 723,000-acre Yaqui River valley is broad, flat and, he said, ranks second in the world in size for a valley that is irrigated by gravity-driven canals. The largest is the Nile valley in Egypt. “It is very good quality land,” he said.

Agricola Gutiérrez farms

A recent tour of Ernesto’s vegetable operations started at a 95-acre vegetable shadehouse, which is 10 years old. This location was outside Obregón at that time, but now the city encroaches on the property. Ernesto is preparing to move to new greenhouses in coming years. He operates another 120 acres of vegetable shadehouses a few miles away.

The shadehouses produce two plant cycles a year. The first cycle is planted in late August with harvest beginning in October and running into December. Then the shadehouses are cleaned and a second crop is planted in late January and harvested in March, April and May.

In southern Sonora, there can be freezes, which recently have occurred with greater frequency. Ernesto’s sweet corn and vegetables suffered “severe problems” from cold in 2011 and 2013. Before this, the freezes occurred every five or six years. In light of the recent pattern, Ernesto plans to launch January and February production to farms two hours south, in northern Sinaloa. Half of his sweet corn production, which is open fields, will be in Sinaloa this winter.

The shadehouses typically yield four or five sets per planting. Because of Mexican summertime heat, the August planting involves seeds, as transplants couldn’t handle the heat inside the shadehouses. Within 30 days the seeds grow to plants seven feet high!

The cooler late January planting uses seedlings.

The U.S. market receives between 80 percent and 90 percent of Agricola Gutiérrez’ cucumber volume. Super select sizes, as well as 24s and 36 sizes go north of the border. “Large” sizes of cucumbers are sold domestically.

In the Gutiérrez packinghouse, the cukes are cleaned and precooled in a chlorine bath in 43-degree water. The variety of cucumber he grows today has a thinner skin that what was produced a decade ago. His packinghouse has very gentle handling procedures.

The facility is PrimusLabs food safety-certified.

The cucumbers and tomatoes are delivered to the GreenPoint warehouse within 24 hours of picking. It is a strength of Sonora production, he noted, that Obregón is within a five-hour drive of Rio Rico.

About a quarter of his volume is packed in returnable plastic containers. These vegetables are sold on contract prior to each season.

When planting begins in mid-December the firm’s shadehouse tomatoes will be planted on plastic row covers for the first time. This will help with weed control.

Agricola Gutiérrez begins shipping its sweet corn Dec. 1. In a Nov. 3 tour, ongoing planting of 900 acres of sweet corn was under way. The most-established stalks were already five feet tall. The firm plants sweet corn on a daily basis, to assure shipping continuity at the harvest end.

Ernesto noted that his corn stalks bear just one ear per plant. This sweet corn variety produces ears that will be at least six-and-a-half inches in length, which is the minimum size requested by North American retailers. If buyers would be happy with five and a half inch ears, Agricola Gutiérrez could have much larger production on a different variety of corn stalk. But for the grower, this is the price of offering the quality demanded by the marketplace.

Furthermore, he said he could have his corn iced at a public icing facility. But this would require having his corn go an extra four or five hours without the cooling effect of ice. To assure the highest quality, he built his own ice plant equipped with ice injectors to shoot into packed cartons.

Agricola Gutiérrez offers bi-color, white and yellow sweet corn. “All of the bi-color is packed in trays,” he noted.

Depending on the time of year, Ernesto employs between 400 and 550 workers. Some live in new subsidized housing, which is within walking distance of his 90-acre shadehouse. If workers can’t walk from their homes, Ernesto pays them an additional 35 pesos ($3) a day to ride the public bus to work.

“We try to help our people have a better life,” Ernesto said.

GreenPoint expands role

As to growth of Agricola Gutiérrez, Ernesto noted, “We try to do everything correctly and well planned, but also with very decisive steps towards growth. Moving forward, we have a lot of plans to grow GreenPoint and Agricola. [GreenPoint asks] for more product and we are ready to do that.”

Now, just 35 percent of GreenPoint’s produce volume comes from its mother company. Ernesto Gutiérrez wants to see that increase to 66 percent within three or four years.

Omar Losolla, who several months ago became GreenPoint’s director of sales and marketing, said the organization “has a lot of potential to grow. But we want it to be at the right pace and we want it to be doable for the grower.”

An expanded GreenPoint sales staff is drawing more customers to the distributor. GreenPoint “has begun to develop a more diverse customer base, direct retail, food service, important wholesale trade, which will give us a stronger national presence,” Losolla indicated. GreenPoint will be expanding in hard squash and is stretching its watermelon program to 12 months a year. GreenPoint has also become a citrus shipper, with lemon, oranges, grapefruit, mandarins and minneolas.

“We are very excited to move forward,” Losolla said.