Yakima Chief Hops grower Erik Sauve on Farmer Voices

 Farmer: Erik Sauve
Farm Business: Sauve & Sons, Yakima Chief Hops
Location: Mabton, WA

Special thank you to Yakima Chief Hops for being a dedicated supporter of Washington Farmland Trust.

My name is Erik Sauve. I’m the Vice President here at Sauve and Son Farms located in Mabton, Washington in the lower Yakima Valley. We’ve been farming here in the same area since 1938. My great-grandfather started the farm. He originally was located in Moxee, where hop farming is really known to be. He ended up borrowing some money from a neighbor, moved down here, wanted to start his own farm, and we’ve been farming in and around the same footprint ever since. We farm roughly 550 acres now across 13 different hop varieties, and we are a part owner of Yakima Chief Hops – we have been since 1997. And so we deliver 100% of our crop to Yakima Chief Hops for processing, pelleting, and sales.

Where I got started, as any farm kid, I grew up on the farm. Always came here to see Grandpa and Dad and wanted to always be around the action, especially during hop harvest. So pretty early on, I knew what I wanted to do. I thought I didn’t, but deep down I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to be a farmer. So I graduated from Grandview High School in 2013 and went on to play some college baseball at Wenatchee Valley College for a few years before transferring to Washington State University in Pullman and getting my agricultural technology and production management degree there. I graduated in the winter of ’17 and immediately moved back to the farm to start my farming career professionally. I’ve been here ever since. I’m married with three kids; three boys – a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and a one-year-old. Mama’s holding down the fort for us right now during harvest, and she’s got her hands full. But ultimately we’re very excited to pass it on to the next generation.

When I first got started here, I thought I knew what I was doing here, but quickly learned I didn’t. So I spent a lot of time learning from my dad and my grandfather, some of our employees, and just getting to know the ropes, slowly getting more comfortable, and expanding my responsibilities on the farm. Today, I’m vice president of the farm, in charge of managerial responsibilities with the employees, and I handle our fertilizer, our spray programs, and our regenerative practices as well. And especially during harvest, I’m pretty much in charge of everything here during harvest: scheduling and baling and kilning and everything like that. I wear a lot of hats (sounds like a lot), but once you kind of get in the flow of everything, it becomes a routine day-to-day.

Right now, we operate with my father, myself, my brother, and my mother here in the office and on site. And we are hands-on every single day. We meet with all of our people every single day, make all the decisions, and keep in close communication with all of the touchpoints here on the farm. We know exactly what’s going on, who’s where, and it really helps to be efficient on the employee aspect of things. Right now, we’re in the middle of hop harvest. Things are fun. It’s been really rainy the last couple of days, but we’re getting through.

I really tried to put a lot of thought into the word resilience and just how perfect that word kind of fits at the farm level right now. It’s not just resilience in the work; it’s resilience in the people, it’s resilience in economics. We are a huge juggling act right now, trying to balance all of that and still make margin, which is where my main focus probably really came about three years ago or so when I mentioned regenerative ag.

My focus originally was on the spraying side of things, and hops are a very heavily constricted crop. They really crunch down on what we call MRLs, which is like spray restrictions by region in the world, and some countries don’t want this residue on their hop. When I first came back, our main pest is called the two-spotted spider mite. We had a pretty heavy infestation for a number of years there. We really were bringing out a lot of sprays and spending a lot of money and still had pest pressures. And, you would think, “you sprayed it and it should work.” Not entirely the case.

And so I really shifted focus on how to improve that aspect of the farm: spray less, saving the money, but still not sacrificing the quality of the crop. And so the resilience kind of ties in really heavily to that. I’ve been experimenting with different cover crop regimens, lots of different species of beneficial flowers, beneficial insects dropped via drone. Just really going down a rabbit hole there and ultimately are seeing a lot of success in a short amount of time, that has really helped alleviate the financial burden of spraying as much as we used to. So, the resilience factor of that has really been validating on that side of things.

And as we know, labor is a huge cost at every farm, and it’s no different story here. Right now, we have upwards of 100 to 110 people during harvest season, which for a farm of our size is huge. And the financial burden on that is huge. So, we try to also respect that people need to make money, there’s no secret about that. We love to have a high percentage of returners, which we usually carry about 80% returners during the harvest season every year, which we wear with a badge of honor because that means that we’re a good company to work for, and we pride ourselves on keeping our people safe as well as being approachable and respectful and everything like that to where people feel safe and respected at our farm.

So we like to make sure that we have a high percentage of returners. It alleviates training confusion, worry, everything that comes in the harvest season. And so right now we know it’s crazy, but we have a breath of fresh air knowing that we’ve got the right people in the right spots and everything like that. But nonetheless, in Washington State, the minimum wage is always going up every single year, and so we have to keep thinking of how to cover the same amount of ground per responsibility in less time, saving money and everything like that. Just because the minimum wage goes up doesn’t mean that the return to grower for a pound of hops is going up, so our margins are slowly shrinking on that end as well. So that’s another hurdle: being resilient about how you can be more efficient, more effective with your hours of work per day, per employee.

Same thing with water. Water is a hurdle as well. Going through a couple of drought years. We are on senior water rights here on Sunnyside Valley Irrigation District on all of our acreage, so we carry senior water rights there, which is good but not great. We’re trying to be effective with water or find ways to maybe invest into water monitoring in the soil so we can be more effective with our irrigation practices and maybe reserve some water for the reservoirs. Personally, if we reserve our water, we don’t get a credit back. They say, “Hey, you didn’t use your amount of water.” We still pay for the percentage acre feet of water per year. But nonetheless, you’d be a better steward of the land if you were not using water that you did not need to use just because you had it. So, all in all, I think that would also be better for the plant health and everything like that.

So weather is interesting here in the Yakima Valley. Especially the last couple days it’s been incredibly wet, which is very untimely and uncommon for this time of year for us. But hops really enjoy heat. They enjoy high heat and long days to climb the twine and get to the top wire. And once they get up there and make their vine and everything else, they still enjoy the heat to keep progressing in the growing phase. But the high heat also is what two-spotted spider mites love. And the hotter it is, the faster they move, the faster they reproduce and everything else. So as much as we love the heat for the plant growth, you have to really manage your pests week to week and make sure that you’re staying on top of that so you don’t get caught in a sticky situation.

And right now, we’re about 90% of the way there, got our crop hanging in the active harvest season, and we got hit with a lot of rain the last couple of days. And the quick weather change can really freak out the plant. We were starting harvest at 85 degrees, which is really nice, and then yesterday it was 60 degrees. A 20-degree swing really freaks out the plant. They kind of start losing color and defoliating. And so just when you’re thinking you’re at the finish line, you’re not. You gotta move with Mother Nature and be resilient and try to find those targets that you gotta hit to make sure you stay on target overall with hop harvest.

So we rely heavily on the snowpack in the mountains to fill our reservoirs full of water throughout the summer as they melt. Last year, we did not get that. We got a lot of rain, which, rain is still good, but the snow was incredibly important because if we get a good snowpack we get a slow melt throughout the summer and it just replenishes that reservoir throughout the summer. So when we don’t get that, we kind of stress here at the tail end of the growing season to see when they might shut off the water and everything like that, as we still have crop hanging out there to go get it. So always, even when growing season is done, we pay real close attention to the weather, especially up in the mountains, hoping for a couple good snowstorms a year to replenish the snowpack up there and hopefully have a good irrigation season the following year

I got a wish list a mile long of things I’d like to invest in to help here at the farm. A big one that I am actually going to start here is the cover cropping. That is the forefront for us. We do one in the fall, then one in the spring. The one in the fall is really to help with moisture retention throughout the wintertime, also replenish the soil of all the work and the traffic that you put on it in the summertime. And then the springtime one, that’s really where we try to focus on the flowering stuff that will be out there throughout the summertime. When they bloom, they attract beneficial insects and really create a nice habitat for the insects to hang around the hop fields. Before we were cover cropping, we were just really working up each row to make them aesthetically pleasing, which at the time, nobody really knew why that’s what we need to do, but everybody knew, “that’s just what you do”. Not saying it was the wrong way, but it does create a lot of issues with the dust that sets on the leaves and magnifies the heat and spider mites and everything else that I’ve mentioned before. So yeah, we dove down the cover cropping game, and I’ve got a really good regimen going on, and I’ve seen a lot of success with that.

The other regenerative practice I mentioned was how we drop beneficial insects throughout the summertime to combat those two-spotted spider mites. Our chemical company provides that service for us, so we purchase the beneficial insects, and they apply them with a drone. That’ll ultimately limit sprays, limit fuel usage, limit carbon emissions, everything like that. So really trying to be regenerative on the forefront on that side of things. We would like to invest into some solar panels to provide some, kind of kick back there as well and reduce our overall electrical usage and be able to give back to the grid if possible. Obviously, during harvest season is our highest usage. We got a lot of roof space up there that can hold a lot of solar panels and can ultimately probably offset our usage.

The other one that I’m looking into and actually applied for some funding for hopefully early next year, is the soil moisture technology and monitoring system, so we can have some software on our computers that we can manage when to turn valves on and off, when we see our soil in that given area at its optimum point, so we can shut the water off. Or we get this one over here that’s looking a little more stressed, and the sensor is saying, “Hey, you might need a little more water or fertilizer over here.” And we can actively do that from our phones or our computers without having to be on-site. I’m pretty excited about that. If that goes through to point us in that direction, I think that we would see some huge benefit over there.

I guess we’re like your cookie cutter family farm. We’re all hands-on. It’s a really neat place to be. Mabton’s really small, but we’ve got a really cool region down here growing hops, and a really nice hop farm down here, and tons of people who are happy to be here, and we’re happy to have them. So we always encourage anybody, if they want to take a nice road trip, come to see it down here, and hopefully we can knock their socks off a little bit. If they want to learn more about our farm, they can go to [yakimachief.com] or our farm here, we even carry our own Instagram page [@sauve_hops] on our Instagram. Yeah, they can reach out. They can check us out there, and yeah, stay tuned.