GRAND JUNCTION — Time feels frozen in the empty-shelf, silent chill of a winter’s day inside Okagawa Farms market.
Grandkids, kids, workers, ancestors and long-gone mentors smile from nearly every wall. Hand-scrawled signs are still tacked above red and white vegetable bins. They are reminders of a season of carrots at $1.29 per pound, bell peppers $1 each, and “picklers” for $36 a half-bushel.
Rusting antique scales that no longer pass muster with government regulators dangle from the ceilings. Metal milk boxes stacked here and there hark back to a long-gone local dairy.
In the midst of all that is suspended here, Frank and Leta Nieslanik crowd near a space heater and reflect on the 34 years they have devoted to owning and operating a farm that is an institution in the Grand Valley.
They have seen generations slap in and out of the old-fashioned ornate front door to pick out Roma tomatoes, legendary roasted green chiles, sweet corn, apples, cucumbers …
But even a market that feels like an integral part of the Grand Valley, is not immune to change.
The Nieslaniks have posted a “for sale” sign out front. They are still trying to come to grips with that.
“It’s a new chapter for us in our lives. We think we’re ready,” Leta said. “But it’s like I felt with empty-nest syndrome. It’s exactly that feeling. This place is such a part of our lives.”
For Frank, it’s simpler: “It just feels kind of crummy.”
A million starts, planted by hand
Sad or just plain crummy, the Nieslaniks decided over the past year that it was time.
They are both 69 years old. They have grandkids spread between Hawaii, Las Vegas and Parker. They want to see them more. Leta lost her mother early this summer, just days after her 90th birthday. She had still been working in the farm market and insisting on helping customers to haul vegetables to their cars into her 89th year.
Her mother’s death hit Leta hard and reminded her that she should make the most of the time she has left. She was diagnosed with incurable malignant melanoma in 2008. It has been kept at bay with surgeries and chemotherapy. But she knows it lurks beneath her otherwise good health.
On top of all that, a terrible hailstorm cut a damaging swath across their farm on Orchard Mesa on June 6 at 4:15 in the afternoon. It was so bad the Nieslaniks remember the precise time when ice from the sky began pounding 200 acres of Okagawa Farm tomatoes, sweet corn and peppers. The Nieslaniks and their workers had just talked two days earlier about how their crops were the most beautiful in many years.
It was especially heartbreaking for a team that does the backbreaking work of babying plant starts in hoop houses in late winter and tucking them into the fields by hand in spring.
All this hand work is the way the late owner Johnny Okagawa and his manager, Yosh Nigo, had taught the Nieslaniks after Johnny agreed to sell them his farm and farm stand in the early 1990s. He only did so after extensive interviews that pried into their personal lives and family stability. The sale also hinged on a $4.50-an-hour apprenticeship for Frank to prove he had the grit to make a go of the farm.
A third of a century later, Frank still proves he learned the lessons well. On a recent day, he is hunkered over a long platform in one of Okagawa’s 11 hoop houses, crushing dried chile peppers with his hands and removing tiny seeds. They will sprout into new starts in the spring and graduate to the chile roasters late next summer.
“We do close to a million transplants to the fields,” Frank said over his growing pile of seeds. “And it is all by hand.”
Region’s farm history is rooted at Amache
Okagawa Farms might not exist if it weren’t for the painful chapter of Japanese incarcerations during World War II.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans on the West Coast were incarcerated at camps around the West. Some ended up in the Amache Relocation Camp on the Eastern Plains of Colorado.
Farmers and fruit growers in the Grand Valley requested that hundreds of these detainees be allowed to come to the Grand Valley to work as farm laborers to replace all the young men who had gone to war. Crops and flowers flourished with workers’ gardening skills.
When they were freed from the camps, some of the Japanese American families chose to stay in the Grand Valley and eventually bought their own farm land and became an integral part of the agricultural community.
For decades, a cadre of Japanese growers collectively sold produce at a stand along U.S. 50 south of Grand Junction. It is fondly remembered for watermelons floating in an ice-filled trough.
The Okagawa name would become the one cemented in the valley’s agricultural psyche over the next decades after Johnny Okagawa opened a low-slung, few-frills vegetable stand on a bluff over the Colorado River and Interstate 70.
When farm stands and wineries sprouted across the valley and became chic tourist attractions, Okagawa Farms remained the old-fashioned place to go for fruits and vegetables bought by the bag and bushel. It was especially popular with those who “put up” food in cans and jars.
The Nieslaniks — Leta, Frank, and Frank’s brother Steve — along with a financially savvy friend, hatched the idea to buy Okagawa Farms after it was rumored to be for sale in 1991. The idea was cemented into an action plan while the four were downing New Year’s Eve beers at a downtown Grand Junction bar.
At the time Leta was working as a bookkeeper in the oil and gas industry. Frank was an insurance adjustor. And Steve was an accountant.
The Nieslaniks weren’t newbies to agriculture. Leta’s family had owned Clymers’ Rose Glen Dairy and she and her siblings helped to milk 350 cows three times a day. As grade-schoolers, after their mother died in an accident, Frank and Steve worked in the family grocery store and game processing business in Meeker. They were all active in 4-H.
They were pretty sure they could run a vegetable farm.
Their skills settled into an easy partnership. Frank oversaw the farm labor. Leta took over the retail operations. Steve handled the wholesale, which now accounts for about 70% of the farm’s sales.
Today, Frank oversees around 20 farmworkers — most of them returning for decades from Mexico on H-2A visas for temporary agricultural workers. Their photos grace one wall of the cooler room where the veggies and fruits are sold. The black-and-white photos, hanging under a sign proclaiming them “Family,” include three generations of some families.
Another sign over the produce warns, “all sales Final, No Returns, No Refunds, No Nothing. You buy, you keep. Enjoy your purchase.”
The retail stand is Leta’s bailiwick and accounts for another 10 to 15 workers.
Leta’s favorite part of the operation is now the plant nursery greenhouse behind a funky faux Western-town front. There she grows bedding plants, hanging flower baskets and indoor plants.
Even as winter is turning it into a moist, cold jungle of tangled greenery, Leta sees the life in there that will soon be demanding a lot of her attention for a final season.
She moves through the greenhouse patting some of her favorites, including a 60-year-old jade plant she calls Mama June. She ruffles the leaves of geraniums, coleus and her prized oleander.
“You’ve gotta want to get to Okagawa’s”
Okagawa Farms today is crowded in by subdivisions. For those who don’t know where it is, it can only be found by watching out for a small “Okagawa” sign propped along a street that winds through a subdivision filled with curving rows of latte-colored homes.
The road ends in a dirt lot where a windmill beckons and a large sign on the farm stand boasts about the vegetables inside: “Any fresher, they’d still be in the fields.”
“It’s a destination,” Leta said. “To get to Okagawa’s, you’ve gotta want to get to Okagawa’s.”
Whoever wants to buy the hidden farm stand will also be getting senior water rights, the lease on 300 rented acres that stretch a mile in one direction and a mile and a half in another, 60,000 square feet of heated greenhouses, 18,000 square feet of storage and processing facilities, living quarters for farmworkers, and even the continued help of a seasoned crew of farmworkers who return year after year. It will all go in a bundle for listed for $1.85 million.
The “for sale” sign feels so final to Leta that she said she feels like she is going to “just bust out crying” at times.
Billie Bowen can relate. The septuagenarian has been working at Okagawa’s for 35 years. She was part of the deal when the Nieslaniks bought the operation.
“I was really, really sad when I heard they were going to sell. But I know how hard they’ve worked,” Bowen said.
She will be at the register again this coming season along with Lupe Lucero who turned 90 in August. Like Bowen, she came with the farm. Both have seen customers line up who came first as kids and now are grandparents whose grandchildren are stopping in to buy their produce. Bowen and Lucero have celebrated customers’ new babies. They have gone to funerals and mourned when longtime customers have died.
Leta and Frank plan to operate Okagawa Farms for another season. They have ordered seed. They have lined up their workers. This year, they have also been thinking of ways they might advise a new owner to modernize; maybe adding local meat and cheeses as some customers have advised.
Frank said he will be more than willing to mentor a new owner just as Johnny and Yosh did for him.
Frank and Leta just returned from Mexico for a family break and plan to take off on a wandering RV trip for the month of January before it is time — the last time — to welcome the workers, mix the dirt, pop the seeds into trays, and begin stocking the shelves. By long tradition, the greenhouse will open April 20 and the farm stand June 20.
“Time goes so fast. It just goes so fast,” Leta said with a sigh and a sad glance at Frank who looks out at his truck with its “VEGOUT” license plate and bows his head over his work-gnarled hands.