Episode 05: Jacqueline Alexander
Jacqueline Alexander: Founder & CEO of Know Your Fruit/Puff Factory
Interviewed by Rashad Floyd
What I love most about being a woman is our flexibility. I've always felt that I could do anything. Before I knew it, I was doing everything. I'm a mother, a farmer, a philanthropist and oh yeah…a lawyer! It’s always been important for me to make the right decisions and move in a professional way and to try making this a better place for everyone.
My farm (Morale Orchards) in Hood River has 36.8 acres, I just round it up to 40. I've always felt like more black people should be involved in farming because it's our legacy. We have lost so much land as black people. In the '20s, there were about 1.1 million black farmers. Fast forward to today there's only 46,000. My vision is for young people to understand that this is an option and it's how we build generational wealth. We need to own the land.
Originally I thought this land was beautiful and my vision was to build a house here. I wasn't even thinking about being a grower at that time 'cause I was in law school. I chose law school to help myself. You know, it's helped me with my business and understand what the opportunities were. I knew I needed an educational background to get to where I wanted to go. While I was in law school at Lewis & Clark College, my husband and I did a series of MLK lectures. It was then that I was inspired to spear head a committee to have a statue of York built on campus. York was the first Black man to be in a military expedition and the first to vote ‘cause he was voting to make decisions. For me, it was about getting his story out. So it was very important for me to have his presence here on this campus. I think Black history is precious. It's something that drives me and I wanted to be a part of that.
I have an Ebony magazine from January of 1967. I actually got it off of eBay for my husband because his family's featured in this magazine. They actually worked on the orchard that we own now. Once you have children, you feel like you’ve gotta move them through this path of life. That's when I started thinking about legacies and what was I gonna do for them? And what was I gonna leave behind?
My motivation to start, Know Your Fruit came about because I wanted to deal with the issue of food waste. There's this huge food waste issue, right? Like we have people that are hungry, but yet we are a society that will throw away perfectly edible fruit. What happens in this community, there's a lot of waste in what's called coal. And so I thought, you know what? I could actually buy coal from all these growers and freeze dry it. Just a short distance from my farm here in Hood River, I purchased more land to build what I call the Puff Factory. The facility was just raw land when I purchased it. So yeah, I came out here and decided to be a contractor, took on this project and it was hard, but I was able to pull it through. The square footage is 36,000 square feet. We'll be up and running by the summer of next year. I wanted to create a product that was traceable. And you could you see where the fruit was grown and you would Know Your Fruit.
There's a lot of different professions related to the food industry. And I want trained people in this industry to know that there's more to just being a grower or a farmer. And I feel like this is the right time to do something that's meaningful.
