Dear Azure Friends and Family,
At the time of my writing, many of our fields are golden yellow with ripened wheat – a welcome sight! When you read this in October, corn and other grain will be ripe, and we will be wrapping up the harvest. We have been blessed with the best yielding crop of spelt we have ever had and are grateful that our wheat was mostly successful on Azure Farm and for the US. Our nation’s harvest looks to be hit-and-miss from area to area, but considering the whole picture, it appears we have had an “almost average” grain harvest nationwide and worldwide.
Grain update
It is a great blessing to have enough for this year! However, I don’t think we will see much of a reduction in price because our pipeline is very short. We have not had such a low worldwide food supply since World War 2, so even though we are enjoying an average harvest overall, it will take a while to “fill our bins” enough to put downward pressure on prices. The situation in Ukraine continues to put upward pressure on pricing – it is my understanding that most Ukrainian farmers did not plant this year due to the war ravaging their country. The same is true for sunflower products. Ukraine produces the largest percentage of sunflowers in the world, so sunflower seed supply is tight and lecithin has quadrupled in price. Until the Ukraine situation gets resolved, my impression is that we will continue to see high prices.
In looking at our fruit supply, for Azure and our country as a whole, the inconsistent spring weather zapped our yield. That April cold spell wiped out the early-bearing varieties of cherries in Northern California, though the later varieties were prosperous. The same happened with apples – this is probably the lowest crop of apples we have picked in the last decade! Thankfully, orchards farther north in Washington had a bumper crop! So we will have more Azure Market apples (sourced from trusted partners) and fewer Azure Husbandry apples (direct from our farm); prices may be a bit higher for some varieties than in years past.
Fire Update
Many of you have asked how we are doing post-fire: We continue working to rebuild our headquarters following the April fire that destroyed it. Our HQ served many functions: it housed our carob, liquid repackaging, fruit packaging, Ellie’s Eden, as well as our offices, conference rooms, storage, and more. During recovery, we quickly repurposed other buildings to get back up and running, and have decided to keep our operations split into different locations; this way our eggs are not all in one basket.
Right after the fire, we moved our carob and liquid repackaging operations into our Dufur Main Street building and we have decided to keep it there – this location gives us plenty of room for expansion. Some of our replacement carob equipment has arrived, so we should be able to get back to making our carob chips and bars shortly. The equipment for cups, truffles, and coated foods hasn’t arrived, so those will be further delayed.
We are waiting on delivery of our new building, which will house fruit packing and cold storage, with some space for Ellie’s Eden, fertilizers, and other ag materials. We are excited that there will also be room for us to develop a glass canning line. I have wanted to make pickles, tomato sauces, salsas, and more for a long time, so this is a silver lining for me!
We had a lot of great things going before the fire, but we had grown so much and we were getting cramped. By splitting up the functions into different spaces, we will have room for expansion and greater efficiency on every front. Hey, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade, right?
In retrospect, I can see that we were grateful for what we had and were making good use of our space. We were comfortable, too. It turns out that providence knew we needed to break out of that comfort zone to be forward-thinking. I choose to look at what happened as an opportunity to frame things differently and to inspire us to rebuild with expansion in mind. In our lives, sometimes if we don’t disrupt ourselves we get disrupted, but it all works for our growth and for good in the long run – if we allow it to.
Always looking forward,
David Stelzer
Founder, Azure Standard