Mr. Ed’s face was flushed and a halo of steam was coming off his head he was so angry. His anger was directed at us, and especially at Mr. C. Unknown to us, but discovered by Mr. Ed, we were pickling more than the cucumbers. All the fish, other animals and plants in the creek behind his house were dead, and that little creek was where we dumped effluent from the pickle plant. This was bad news for us.
The plant had dumped wastes in that creek for decades and nothing had ever happened to the fish. Something had changed because since time immortal freshwater invertebrates, minnows and perch had been killed by salt water. Always the briny effluent from the Pickle Shed had contained some salt, occasionally up to about 1.1 lbs of salt/gallon, or some lime. This caused much consternation for us, for local citizens and for the Texas Water Quality Board, the forerunner of the Texas EPA, and it may have been the straw that eventually broke the camel’s back. Prior to the observation of dead fish and plants most complaints had been about the odor emanating from the Pickle Shed.
What happened? Answer: we grew too fast and overlooked some things that would be obvious today, but weren’t then. Mr. C. was ideally suited to grow a business, but he could have benefited from having technical people on his staff. During the day he worked the telephone and visited with potential customers who dropped by for discussions and to “kick the tires”, and there wasn’t much time left to tend to technical matters, although he was trained as an engineer. Mr. C. had spent a career participating with marketers and promoters to grow a local brewery (Schlitz) into a nationwide juggernaut. Thus, the moment a visitor indicated an interest in a special product, Mr. C. knew how to get their business. Even today after 35 years of promoting ideas, product and process concepts, marketable products and of prospecting for new customers, I still am amazed at Mr. C.’s ability in these areas.
Our business expanded along two major lines: fresh produce and salting of cucumbers. We shipped fresh cucumbers to such places as Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, New Orleans, St. Louis and Chicago. On paper this looked like a good business activity, but we lost about 50% of our shipments from spoilage of the produce. After a few losses, Mr. C. stopped this activity and concentrated on other things.
To give the reader an understanding of Mr. C.’s ability to develop business, one or two projects stand out above the others. A Food Broker indicated that they needed pickles for relishes, but had a hard time acquiring enough quality raw materials. Ironically, each day we stationed men to hand pick and discard crooked (crooks) and knobby cucumbers (nubbins) that were in the farmers’ produce. We either threw the crooks and nubbins away or gave them to any farmer who could use them. Under Mr. C.’s leadership we weighed and paid farmers about $0.40/100 lbs for these previously discarded cucumbers. The farmers were happy to get paid for something that was a cull in the past. We pickled the crooks and nubbins like all the other cucumbers, and Mr. C. sold the product for the best $/100 lbs sales price that the company ever achieved. The business axiom that I learned: Turn Your Trash Into A Specialty Product For Your Customer. The other long-term notable result of this product development: a niece, Francis, received a nickname, Nubbin, from my brother Mack. Another business activity that expanded our effluents was the Muleshoe project, another story.
In a short amount of time, we were salting cucumbers from near and far, and this eventually resulted in the need to dispose of huge amounts of brine. For example, when we filled a vat with cucumbers, we dumped either bushel baskets or big sacks, weighing 50 or 100 lbs, respectively. For every 500 lbs of cucumbers (10 bu) dumped into a vat, we added 25 lbs of rock salt. When the vat was filled to within 6 inches of the top we added saturated salt water (brine) to cover them. The brine had two principal functions: to allow desirable bacteria to thrive and to preserve the cucumbers.
Osmotic action caused by the brine drew water and biochemicals out of the cucumbers. The salt-tolerant microbes, primarily bacteria of the genus Leuconostoc and Lactobacilli, used the sugars and nitrogen-containing substances for metabolism and growth, and in the absence of oxygen, they produced carbon dioxide, lactic acid, smaller amounts of ethanol and acetic acid as waste products of their metabolism. The last three waste products were the pickling agents.
If there were problems with the freshly filled tanks, they were of two prncipal kinds: a) the fermentation process did not occur or b) there was too much fermentation. The lack of fermentation was rare, but when the expected small amount of foam and the proper aroma did not develop, the solution was to give the vat a transfusion. We drained a large amount of the liquor out and replaced it with brine from 2 or 3 functioning vats. I didn’t know it at the time, but the bad vat did not have the proper bacteria in it, and that meant that they were not present on the cucumbers in the field. In contrast, the properly functioning vat had been filled with cucumbers from a field harboring the proper bacteria. At the time, I had a difficult time understanding what the word transfusion meant much less understanding the microbial ecology.
The second problem was too much fermentation, and in this case carbon dioxide built up beneath the cap to such an extent that it blew the cap apart. This happened more frequently than too little fermentation and occurred when cucumbers had excess fermentable substances in them; I guess the farmers really pumped them up with fertilizers. Usually these vats also had foam up to 3 feet tall on them. This wasn’t considered a dire emergency, but we usually removed 30-50 bushels of cucumbers as rapidly as feasible, put them into another vat, and recapped the damaged vessel. Neither of these problems contributed much to the effluent from the plant.
In all vats, we measured the saline concentration daily and gradually added salt until the content was nearly 16% salt, and then we maintained this level of salt until the product was shipped to a customer. As is obvious, we used a huge amount of salt in the operation. On our busiest days thousands of pounds of rock salt, one bucket and shovel full at a time, were handled by two full-time people! We bought salt in train car quantities, shoveled it from boxcar to truck and then into storage bins. My back aches with the memory of those ordeals. It should not surprise the reader to learn that we used stainless steel wherever possible to slow the rusting process, but nails, hinges, belt buckets, zippers etc. succumbed to the salt and decomposed in record time.
After a few months in the brine, the cucumbers were removed from the vats and shipped to customers. We then dumped the brine and refilled the vats with clean water and added about 25 lbs of lime to it to prevent mosquitoes and other critters from growing in it as the weather warmed. When the cucumber harvest began to arrive the next summer, we dumped the limed water, rinsed and scrubbed the inside of each vat until it was spotless. The vats had a 1.5” diameter bung in the bottom and another about 6 inches above the bottom to aid in release of the liquids. I concluded that the volume of fresh, salty and limed water that we released increased about 20-fold over the course of a 5-year period, and this meant that the creek and its inhabitants were constantly being bathed in solutions that were unfavorable for life. The unrelenting odor and the newly discovered effluent problems overshadowed many positive aspects about the Pickle Shed, but the bad deed had been done, accidentally.
The Pickle Shed provided multiple people in our community much needed wages and many of us acquired skills, unrecognized at the time, lasting a lifetime. For me, I learned the basics of doing business in a very competitive field, commodity agriculture. It’s often been said, and even written in some business books, that someone who can make a living selling pickles can make a living doing just about anything, I’ve given it a whirl in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, agriculture, hotels, trading and service industries, always reverting to things I learned at the Pickle Shed. Three important business axioms were: a) turn your trash into your customer’s most valuable product, b) location, location, location was the key to economic success in agricultural as well as in other industrial endeavors, and c) a good manager utilized the brains and brawn of all employees, assigned responsibility to them and held everyone accountable for getting the work done. I suppose the most valuable lesson learned was that skills may be learned in unexpected places and from unappreciated resources, including from people who are vastly less educated than you.
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