South Florida Sun-Sentinel - December 29, 2005, 2005 - Deborah S. Hartz, Food Editor - Highlights from the article
Feels like Family. Brooks Tropicals may be a multinational company, but its employees still know how to come together for a celebration.
Brooks Tropicals in Homestead is a bit of a hybrid. It’s owned by Neal palmer (Pal) Brooks, a third-generation farmer; his two sons are on the board of directors. And while Brooks Tropicals owns the South Florida land where it raises some of the avocados it sells, most of the land it oversees is in Belize. The company contracts with local farmers who supply tropical fruits that Brooks packs and sells.
What makes Brooks Tropicals feel like a family farm is that many of its employees come from farm families themselves.
Like CEO Craig Wheeling, who is a fourth-generation Miami farmer. His great grandfather was a dairy farmer in Bergen, Norway. His family started the Hialeah Dairy in 1909.
"In those days, all of Hialeah was cattle", he says. His mother would tell him stories about filling a 50-gallon drum with rattlesnakes they killed before opening a field to cattle. His family sold that farm in 1960 when they moved to Homestead to grow avocados.
Today, Brooks carries more than 30 different tropical fruits and vegetables. Its largest crop is the South American papaya. But Florida avocados, or FlimCados, are Brooks’ second-largest crop with the fruit grown on more than 3,500 acres in Miami-Dade.
|
