Still raising cane
George Wedgworth is a 40-year veteran of Florida’s sugar wars
By Susan Salisbury,
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Editor’s Note: This article is reprinted courtesy the Palm Beach Post
eorge Wedgworth relishes talking about the
time he decided to have a little fun with environmentalists
who have opposed the powerful
sugar industry in the Glades for decades.
“I told them when the muck is all gone, we
will build condos. They’ll be gated communities, and we will
name them after you. I said it with a straight face. Then I see
Charles Lee quoted in the newspaper saying, ‘We’ve got to
stop this development.’
“I did it to aggravate him,” says Wedgworth, 73, who
founded and heads the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of
Florida. He succeeded. Lee, executive vice president of the
Audubon Society of Florida,
takes the idea seriously even
today. “I’m not sure I agree with
George Wedgworth on many
things, but on the question of
urban development being worse
than growing sugar, we would
agree on that,” he said recently.
Wedgworth can’t be blamed
for trying to bring some levity to
the battles he’s fought as chief
executive and president of the
54 grower cooperative he began
in July 1960.
As its chief, he has been on the
front lines of the industry’s
biggest political, environmental,
economic and labor-related battles.
Throughout, the co-op has been a
stable group, with five of its original
board members still serving
today.
The co-op’s first year, 1962-63,
saw production of 77,617 tons of sugar from 21,649 acres. Last
season, it produced 373,895 tons from 75,558 acres, about 20
percent of Florida’s sugar production. Over that same period, the
co-op’s annual revenue from sugar and molasses sales has grown
to more than $150 million.
The co-op marked its 40th crop year in April.
“I’m a great believer in teamwork. One person can’t do it
all,” Wedgworth says. “It has to be a team whether it’s a
cooperative or a company.”
Wedgworth’s perspective is unique among the heads of Florida’s
three sugar firms. Unlike the bosses at West Palm Beachbased
Florida Crystals Corp. and Clewiston-based U.S. Sugar
Corp., Wedgworth grew up in the Glades. He was born in
Starkeville, Miss., and his family moved to Belle Glade in 1930,
when George was two and his father, Herman, became a plant
pathologist at the University of Florida’s agricultural center.
Within two years, Herman Wedgworth quit his $1,800 a year
job and started his own vegetable farm.
It’s an upbringing that George Wedgworth, a 1946 graduate
of Belle Glade High School, has never moved away from,
despite his success and wealth. He
won’t disclose his income, but
says, “I’m paid way too much.”
With labor and trade acumen
second to none in the industry,
Wedgworth still prefers the simpler
lifestyle of an old Florida farmer
over that of a sugar magnate. He
only recently traded in his early
‘90s Oldsmobile for a new Buick.
Wedgworth and his wife, Peggy,
who met in the ninth grade, live in
Belle Glade in the one-story concrete
block house George’s mother,
Ruth, built in 1941. The white,
five-bedroom house faces two-lane
East Canal Street and overlooks the
sugar cane fields and smokestacks
of the co-op’s sugar mill.
Wedgworth lived away from the
Glades only when he and Peggy
attended what was then called
Michigan State College, now
Michigan State University. He graduated with honors in 1950
with a degree in agricultural engineering.
“I just don’t know any different. I’m within five minutes of
my office. I’ve never had the desire to go anywhere else,” says
Wedgworth, the father of four grown children two sons and
two daughters. He and his wife have 11 grandchildren.
Geography hasn’t hampered his success
Instead, he and his family, owners of Wedgworth’s Inc.,
the state’s largest fertilizer company, with 150,000 tons of
“Big W” brand production a year, and Wedgworth Farms
Inc., a 5,000-acre sugar cane farm, have made their livelihood
from the muck, the rich black soil of the Glades.
Wedgworth’s youngest son, Dennis, a Duke University
graduate, runs the family businesses. The elder Wedgworth
sees to business at the co-op, Belle Glade’s largest employer,
with 900 employees.
True to his philosophy on teamwork, Wedgworth has
done two multimillion-dollar deals with rival Florida Crystals,
owned by the Fanjul family
of Palm Beach.
Florida Crystals and the coop
last year bought the company
that makes Domino Sugar
and its three refineries for $205
million. That followed a 1998
partnership in which they
bought Refined Sugars Inc., a
Yonkers, N.Y., refinery, for a
reported $65 million.
“They have a higher profile
than we do politically,” Wedgworth
says of the Fanjuls, “but
(the co-op and the family) got a lot in common with sugar.”
Wedgworth, with a reputation for being feisty and thorough,
believes in dealing with controversy head-on, whether
the issue is phosphorus levels in Lake Okeechobee or ash
residue from burning cane fields before harvesting.
“He likes getting to the bottom of things,” says Belle
Glade grower Rick Roth, 49, a co-op board member whose
family has known the Wedgworths for decades. “He’s been a
true visionary who takes time to understand how all the
pieces fit together.”
Dalton Yancey, executive vice president of the Florida
Sugar Cane League, the industry’s longtime Washington lobbyist,
echoed those sentiments.
He said Wedgworth reads everything that comes his way
and never backs down. “If I am going to be in a fight at the end
of an alley, I want George Wedgworth in that alley with me.
He will fight and has a reputation for getting things done.”
Even the Audubon’s Lee concedes: “George has been the
grand old spokesman for sugar and agriculture in the Everglades
Agricultural Area for a long time. He is respected in
that industry, and is a tenacious advocate for his industry.”
Haunted by childhood tragedy
Wedgworth’s early years were marked by tragedy. He still
is haunted by a day in 1938.
“I was with my father when he got killed. He was at the
(vegetable) packing house and a crane was lifting a 10-ton ice
machine. My cousin and I were playing in the packing house.
I heard the accident. I remember seeing him under those
beams,” George says, choking up.
“My mother stepped right in to run the (family’s thriving
vegetable farm). She was keeping the books already,” Wedgworth
recalls. “Her kids were 5, 10 and 15 when he died. She
didn’t come home until 9 or 10 o’clock at night.”
Wedgworth says his parents had a profound influence on
him. Their drive became his and showed itself when he was
a youngster in 4-H. He started with six cows and had a herd
of 26 by high school.
His parents, Wedgworth says, “came here from Michigan
State College (where Herman was an associate professor)
with nothing but the shirts on their backs. They both came
from meager backgrounds, and
they thrived on a challenge.”
Wedgworth does, too. He
and farm manager Vernie
Boots, a mechanic, built the
first mobile celery harvesting
unit in 1950. The machine, no
longer in use, allowed picking
and packing to be done in the
field, saving time and money.
Wedgworth also founded
the Florida Celery Exchange in
the 1950s. The cooperative put
an end to growers selling
against each other.
“I found that we could grow beautiful, beautiful celery, and
then the salesmen would give it away. My mother said, ‘Well,
if you are going to be critical of our sales methods, I am
going to put you in charge of it.’”
The exchange soon was born. But celery, like other vegetables,
is a fragile crop. When the U.S. government decided it
no longer wanted to be dependent on sugar from Cuba following
Fidel Castro’s takeover, Wedgworth saw an opportunity to
move into growing the more stable commodity.
In 1960, he called 16 Glades vegetable growers about
forming a sugar cooperative. With 52 growers on board initially,
the Glades Sugar House broke ground in October 1961.
“George is one of the first people who started the movement
in the 1960s to expand the industry beyond just U.S.
Sugar and (the Fanjul family’s) Okeelanta, which existed at
that time,” said Jim Terrill, executive vice president of U.S.
Sugar Corp. “He’s a pioneer.”
The big switch to sugar cane
By the end of the decade, Wedgworth Farms, as well as
many other former vegetable growers, had switched to growing
nothing but sugar cane.
Sugar growers shared some hot political issues with the rest
of agriculture. A big issue was the poor working and living
conditions of migrant laborers, including cane cutters, the socalled
guest workers from the British West Indies, mostly
Jamaica. In 1970, Wedgworth testified before the U.S. Senate
subcommittee on migratory labor on behalf of Florida vegetable
and sugar cane growers to counter some of the charges
against the industry. In that testimony, he ripped into newscaster
Chet Huntley’s report titled “Migrant An NBC White
Paper,” saying it was filled with “inaccuracies and bias.”
The “Palm Beach Post-Times” ran the complete text of
Wedgworth’s testimony. He was quoted as saying: “I feel that
there was much ‘sneaky journalism’ involved in the film,
which took exceptional circumstance or incident many
times out of context and implied that Florida was ‘rampant
with conditions bordering on slavery
and racism’ and that no one in
Florida was making any constructive
effort to help the migrant.
These accusations and innuendoes
are just not so.”
By the late ‘70s, the sugar
industry began harvesting
mechanically. The co-op had
totally mechanized its harvest by
the 1991-92 crop, ending the need
for the hand cutting of cane and
saving $10 million a year. But disputes
over labor contracts from
the 1980s continue to this day.
The sugar industry’s burning of
cane fields, a part of the harvesting
process to clear away debris, also has been controversial. In
the 1960s, the American Lung Association alleged that the
ash and smoke from the burning was killing people.
Wedgworth remembers the day in 1968 when he received
a letter signed by then Gov. Claude Kirk saying the industry
must “cease and desist” from burning cane fields.
“Nat Reed was head of the state Department of Pollution,”
Wedgworth said. “I called him and said, ‘Mr. Reed . . . it would
shut us down and put over 25,000 people out of work. We’re
going to find the best people we can to tell us what we’re
doing. If we’re doing something wrong, we’ll correct it.’ ”
Out of that came a burn permit process regulated by the
state’s Forestry Department and a network of 37 air samplers
in Palm Beach, Hendry and Broward Counties that still operates
today, measuring particles.
“We’re still burning,” Wedgworth says. “We had to
change some of our techniques. But we’re still burning.”
More environmental issues
Today, environmental issues loom the largest for sugar
growers. The $8 billion Everglades Restoration Project,
aimed at meeting the water related needs of the region for
the next 50 years and restoring the Everglades, was signed by
then President Clinton in December 2000.
Before that, Wedgworth and about 20 other agricultural
leaders and environmentalists, including Reed of Hobe
Sound had signed a letter asking Congress to include Everglades
restoration in the Water Resource and Development
Act of 2000.
“We were very pleased . . . that we got a document with
my signature on it along with Nat Reed’s,” Wedgworth says.
“If we had continued to throw darts at each other, nothing
would get done. It was a great day.”
Wedgworth said that was shattered, however, when environmental
groups began raising questions about the restoration
project right after the agreement was signed.
“Now I am afraid they’re not satisfied,” Wedgworth says.
He said the sugar industry has its own questions about how
water storage and recovery wells
will work and is waiting for engineers
and water managers to conduct
pilot projects.
Wedgworth doesn’t expect to be
around to see the end of conflict
and controversy in the sugar
industry, but considers it part of
the business. In 1996, the industry
fought a proposed penny-a-pound
tax on sugar that voters defeated.
Environmental groups pushed for
the tax to pay for Everglades
cleanup. The $35 million campaign
was costly for both sides.
“It was unfortunate that the
environmental groups attacked the
industry when we could have accomplished a lot more for the
Everglades if we could have sat down across the table to try to
determine what’s good for the Everglades,” he says.
“We have always had our doors wide open for those discussions,”
he adds. “They’re the ones who attacked the industry
with a referendum that could have damaged our company to
the extent we would not still be here if it had passed.
“The way to help the Everglades is to stay out of fighting
each other, and roll up our sleeves and do something that is
good for the Everglades.”
When he’s not fighting the industry’s battles, Wedgworth
and his wife who considers herself his polar opposite
because of her more laid back personality like to escape to
their ranch in Okeechobee County on the weekends.
“Last weekend he put up 25 birdhouses for bluebirds. He
plays tennis and he relaxes more up there,” says Peggy
Wedgworth. “He’s got his computers, and he checks his email.
He drives the tractor and mows the pastures.”
The seemingly tireless Wedgworth recovered well from
open-heart surgery in 1978 and doesn’t plan to retire.
Peggy expects him to continue his 50-hours-plus work weeks.
“I think he was motivated by his mother. He saw how
she worked and kept everything going. Right now with the
sugar mill, he loves what he’s doing. That makes a lot of
difference.”
