With a mission to exceed its customers expectations in quality and service, King Ferry, NY-based Turek Farms is constantly improving its company, systems, products and services.

“We’ve done a bunch of new construction, changed our docks around, and we’re in the process of building an ice plant to service some sweet corn,” said Jason Turek, a partner in Turek Farms and its marketing arm, Cayuga Produce Inc.

Turek Farms grows and ships sweet corn, green beans, summer squash, cabbage, winter squash, pumpkins, Indian corn, gourds, radish, tray pak sweet corn and cucumbers.

Turek Farms is a multi-generation family business that has been moving fresh vegetables since the late 1960s. Seen here are Jason Turek and Frank Turek Jr. (Photos courtesy of Turek Farms)As far as its sweet corn deal goes, Turek said its currently transitioning north and should get started in Delaware soon after the Fourth of July, and will then move on to New York by July 20-25.

While he expected the deal to run through the first part of September, Turek also noted that the weather has had a bit of an impact on the company’s sweet corn crop.

“It was a god awful winter in New England and it was late to let go, so we were a tad late starting,” he said. “But May was a pretty good month with above normal temperatures. Once we hit Memorial Day though, the last two weeks we’ve just been inundated with water. We’ve had way more than we need. We’re going to have some pretty big gaps in production I think at some point during the summer.”

The crops most affected by the weather seem to be green beans and cabbage, he added.

“The problem is you run out of weeks. We just run out of decent farmable weather,” Turek said. “We’re going to probably leave some acres empty here this season.”

On the food-safety front, Turek Farms continues to take its responsibilities very seriously, and uses strategies such as forced air/hydrocooling of vegetables; in-field inspections of produce to ensure only top-quality product is packed and shipped; Integrated Pest Management; and third-party auditing to ensure its food-safety program is effective.

“Food-safety has become a way of every day life,” Turek added.

As for the summer ahead, Turek is looking forward to a good season, noting that pumpkin and hard squash have been planted and are just in need of a little extra sunshine, as well as holding field trials for the major seed companies at the farm.

“We’ll probably trial a few hundred different varieties of sweet corn hoping to find something new and exciting for our customers,” he said. “We’ll be evaluating them in August. Usually out of a few hundred there’s one that catches everybody’s eye.”

Turek also mentioned that the company has recently taken a position of being 100 percent GMO-free on its vegetable varieties.

“Not that it’s good, bad, indifferent to grow them; but it’s not what our customers want, so we’re taking a stand — we’re 100 percent GMO-free,” he concluded.