Just outside of Eugene, nestled in the gently rolling hills of Willamette Valley, sits Fall Creek Farm and Nursery. Not many Eugenians know that this nursery, encompassing three locations not more than a twenty-five minute drive from the University of Oregon, is the birthplace of some of the most ubiquitous blueberries in the country.
“If you take blueberries that are consumed everywhere all over the world — especially if they’re bigger, crunchy or sweeter — chances are that Fall Creek has something to do with it,” says Amelie Aust, Fall Creek’s second generation owner and executive chairman. According to Aust, Fall Creek is responsible for producing, on average, 35 million blueberry seedlings a year that have been transplanted across the globe to be grown into fully fledged blueberry plants for commercial purposes.
Over four decades ago, Aust’s parents had “a simple, bucolic dream,” she says.
“It started when my parents, Dave and Barbara, two hippies from Humboldt County, California, decided that they wanted to have a blueberry farm,” Aust says.
Her parents were not farmers; Dave Brazelton was a vet technician and Barbara Brazelton was a nurse. However, Dave had developed an affinity towards blueberries as a teen. In the summers, he would hop on the Greyhound Bus and hand-rake wild blueberries on his uncle’s farm in New Jersey. One day, he hand-harvested more than 1,000 pounds of blueberries.
It was this love for nursery and the Pacific Northwest that led the Brazeltons to settle in Lowell, Oregon, and pursue their own blueberry vision.
From its roots as a modest, family-run farm, Fall Creek Farm and Nursery has expanded into Mexico, The Netherlands, Peru, Spain and South Africa and touched blueberry crops across the globe. In pursuit of their mission statement: “To Build A World With Better Blueberries™,” according to the Fall Creek website, the Nursery has maintained its progressive and family-oriented focus.
Aust spent afternoons of her childhood tramping through the farm with the family labrador, Bing, and manning a small fruit stand with her brother to earn an allowance and build a college fund. A University of Oregon alum and Fulbright scholar, Aust returned to the family business with her German-born husband, Boris Aust, in 2007. Her brother, Cort Brazelton, took on the role of co-CEO. At the time, Fall Creek was still a domestic, Oregon-based business with a modest 65 employees. An acre and a half was allotted to blueberry production, while the rest of the land was for nursery. It had not changed dramatically since the Brazeltons had started their business in 1978. Back then, blueberries were a seasonal crop, only available in the summer.
“20 years ago, blueberries really could only be successfully grown in areas like the Willamette Valley, or areas that had winters, so the plants had to go dormant,” says Paul Sandefur, the director of breeding at Fall Creek. “It was a very short harvest window.”
Willamette Valley remains one of the nursery capitals of the world, due to an abundance of clean water, temperate climate and relatively low threat of pest infestation. Oregon predominantly supports blueberry varieties characterized as high “chill,” which corresponds to the amount of time spent below 42 degrees Fahrenheit.
Today, breeders have developed low and medium chill varieties that no longer require winter.
Blueberry growers have been able to produce a yearlong supply of fresh blueberries across the United States and beyond in Peru, Mexico and South Africa as a result.
“The reason why we are in all these places is that supermarkets want 52 weeks of blueberries a year,” Aust says. “So in order to do that, our customers have to grow them at many different latitudes to hit different supply windows.”
Fall Creek has played a pioneering role in this development. Since its inception, Fall Creek has focused on cultivating varieties of blueberries that can flourish in different environments and climates. Through an understanding of blueberry genetics, selective breeding and ongoing research, the genetics team at Fall Creek considers themselves to be de-facto matchmakers.
“We have our favorite blueberry mothers and we have our favorite blueberry fathers. And we just help them find the best match. So we do what the bees do: we take the pollen from the father plant, and then we take that to the mother plant. And we just pollinate the flowers,” says Sandefur. From the resulting blueberry plants, the team can evaluate their potential as new blueberry varieties.
What makes a good blueberry? Although it depends on who you ask, most people agree that they want a fresh, firm blueberry with a uniform color, Sandefur says. Connoisseurs tend to diverge most on taste. According to Sandefur, some new blueberry varieties have a strong flavor like peaches and nectarines. Others have a distinct raspberry flavor. Ultimately, Sandefur strives to create a blueberry you want to eat more of, which means you have emptied out a clamshell container of blueberries before you know it.
“You reach into the clamshell and pick up a blueberry. And after that first one, you don’t realize that you’ve gone back and you’ve eaten the rest of the clam. At one sitting, you sat down and you ate an entire six or eight ounces of blueberries,” Sandefur says.
From the perspective of blueberry growers, the ideal blueberry variety is one that produces large, high-quality yields with few resources.
The cost of land, water and various inputs like fertilizer and labor is increasing. People who grow blueberries are Fall Creek’s primary customer, who go on to sell to grocery stores.
The other main customer of Fall Creek is other nurseries, who rely on Fall Creek to generate varieties that they themselves can grow and provide to growers. Through the Oregon Blueberry Association, nurseries work together on state commissions to improve the blueberry crop.
“We’ve worked on the same team to get things like exports to Korea, to work together on pest and disease problems, and work on funding public breeding programs that then turn out varieties that help the whole industry,” says Jon Umble, director of breeding.
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged many industries, including blueberry nurseries and growers, to step up in third-world countries. Places like Peru, a growing spigot of the blueberry industry, struggled with a lack of infrastructure and clinic access. Given the resource deficit, the blueberry industry focused on “‘how can we ban together?’” Aust says.
One of the most powerful things that the industry did was collaborate with the Peruvian government to help organize refrigerated truck containers to help manage people’s bodies after they had passed away, Aust says. Fall Creek played an instrumental role in organizing these efforts.
Fall Creek also supports public blueberry breeding programs across the United States, from the University of Florida to North Carolina to Washington to Michigan to Oregon State University, according to Sandefur.
“If you look at Oregon agriculture as a whole, the nursery makes up a really, really big piece of it. And so it’s really exciting to be part of that dynamic industry,” Umble says. According to the USDA, Oregon boasts the third-largest nursery industry in the United States, contributing to 11% of the material sold nationwide.
Fall Creek has also been at the forefront of sustainable agriculture practices, employing a number of techniques to reduce the amount of pesticides and water that they have to use.
Dave Daniel, the operation manager for US facilities, discovered 15 years ago that if the farm used finely ground blue gravel, it served as weed control.
“I have neighbors that use more Roundup in a year in their yard than we do on the farm because there’s no weeds, because it doesn’t germinate in the gravel,” says Daniel. “So it’s part of our integrated pest management program to make sure that we don’t use more chemicals than we need to.”
All nursery facilities also have an intricate subsurface drainage system that collects all unused irrigation water. This ensures that the runoff does not end up in the nearby creek, and can be reused after being filtered.
Fall Creek also relies on techniques such as preemptively separating young plants in nursery pots before shipment, allowing for air flow between plants and reducing the incidence of disease that emerges in high density conditions. The introduction of new greenhouses that sense external temperatures and automatically trigger venting mechanisms has allowed the nursery to more effectively harness solar energy.
Many of these innovations are thanks to the precise and conscientious management of Daniel, who was introduced to Fall Creek in 1989. When he met Dave and Barbara Brazelton, Daniel says they could not have been more friendly. He said he was just a kid that called up and said “hey” but ended up making an appointment and spent 5 hours discussing the intricacies of gravel and seasonal equipment practices.
Daniel worked as an independent contractor for Fall Creek until he was eventually invited to work full time for Fall Creek in the early 2000s. He joined with his wife, Amy Daniel, who now works as the Communications Manager for Fall Creek.
“Dave came to me at one point and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you just sell us your facility and come to work for us?’ And that’s how Amy and I became a part of the family,” Daniel says.
Daniel has engaged with Future Farmers of America, an organization dedicated to helping future generations pursue careers in agriculture, described as “more than planting and harvesting” and rather “a science, a business, and an art” by the Oregon FFA website.
“A number of young people that I’ve spoken to do not realize there was so much opportunity in horticulture, from finance to legal to sales to genomics and tissue culture,” Daniel says.
Aust echoes this sentiment. She says there are positions across the board, from the science side — including biology, biotechnology, genetics and breeding — to the human resources side and finance side. As part of its recruitment plan to bring young people into the company, Fall Creek has started to attend career fairs at the University of Oregon, Oregon State University and Lane Community College, according to Daniel.
Despite its international success and the growth of the blueberry industry, Fall Creek is still the sustainable, family-owned business that was born out of the Brazeltons’ bucolic love of blueberries 45 years ago.
“The first generation’s big legacy is creating this living, breathing thing called Fall Creek. And then the second generation: our legacy is to grow that thing. But we have the luxury of being larger and having more resources,” Aust says. “Our legacy also has to be contribution. It has to be contribution environmentally. It has to be contribution socially.”
Fall Creek Farm and Nursery produces 35 million blueberry seedlings each year at their three locations.
