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actus Feeders, headquartered in Amarillo, Texas, has 10 large-scale cattle feedyards across the Texas High Plains & southwest Kansas. Since its founding in 1975, Cactus Feeders has grown into a $750 million company that employs about 500 people. Cactus Feeders is the world's largest cattle feeding operation. We buy cattle every day, so you can get more money for your cattle with Cactus Feeders. Employees own 40 percent of Cactus Feeders through our Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Employee ownership means that each employee has a personal stake in the performance of the cattle and the success of Cactus Feeders. For our cattle feeding customers, this translates into a level of care and feeding for their cattle that only ownership can provide.

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? At Cal-Maine Foods, it's the egg, and the company's 27 million laying hens can attest to that. It is one of the largest fresh shell egg producers in the US. Cal-Maine sells its eggs to US food retailers. It produces value-added specialty eggs (organic, Omega-3 enhanced, free range) that it sells under the Egg-Land's Best and Farmhouse labels. The company controls all aspects of the business, from hatching chicks, making feed, housing hens, and distributing eggs. Its operations include two breeding facilities, two hatcheries, five distribution centers, 19 feed mills, 37 shell-egg production operations, 26 pullet-growing facilities, and 31 processing and packing sites.

Turning a delicious but odd-shaped fruit into a household favorite wasn’t in the plan when a group of grower-hobbyists banded together in 1924 to form the California Avocado Growers Exchange. And two more years would pass before Rudolph Hass of La Habra, California, would plant the state’s first Hass avocado tree.At the time, avocado growers had no quality standards, no distribution channels, and only one facility, a packinghouse in Vernon, California. During that first year, the Growers Exchange packed 18,000 pounds of avocados from that packinghouse and, in doing so, launched an industry.Though the Vernon packinghouse has long since closed, the company that sprang from that Growers’ Exchange - now known as Calavo Growers, Inc. - is still going strong some 81 years later. In 2005, this publicly traded, diversified, global agribusiness packed approximately 35 percent of the California avocado crop, nearly double the market share of its closest competitor. Three modern packinghouses - strategically located in Santa Paula and Temecula, California, and Uruapan, Michoacan, Mexico - teem with productivity and thrive on volume, packing approximately 200 million pounds per year. The company is now headquartered in Santa Paula, California and employs more than 500 people.

California’s first commercial cotton sprouted in 1862 in what would later become Kern County (where Calcot is headquartered today), but the San Joaquin Valley didn’t earn its reputation as a producer of “white gold” until the next century, after World War I, when the federal government wanted extra long staple cotton for military applications. The homegrown group began as the San Joaquin Cotton Growers in Delano in 1927 and has been headquartered in Bakersfield since 1931. The co-op grew out of a Delano grower’s frustration over the middlemen in the cotton industry.In 1926, Capt. Frank E. Green had a lunch meeting in a Delano hotel, where he pitched the idea of a growers’ cooperative to his peers. The grape and cotton farmer had been mulling the idea since 1922, when the Capper-Volstead Act passed, allowing farmers to form cooperative groups without violating anti-trust laws.

Since 1924, Ocean Mist Farms has pioneered the commercial planting and shipping of Artichokes in Castroville (a town that has become synonymous with the thorny, odd-looking little vegetable), and today it is recognized as the largest Artichoke operation in the United States. Through the Depression, labor strikes, wars, floods and freezes, Ocean Mist Farms' commitment to high quality and superior service has never wavered. Commitment to its customers has always dictated a continuous emphasis on quality assurance from soil to consumer.In 1924, Daniel Pieri, Amerigo and Angelo Del Chiaro, Alfred Tottino and James Bellone launched the California Artichoke & Vegetable Growers Corporation, renamed Ocean Mist Farms in January of 1995. Pieri had been in the produce business in San Francisco since 1908 and had considerable experience in growing Artichokes and Brussels Sprouts in the San Gregorio and Half Moon Bay areas, having earlier formed the San Francisco Artichoke Association and the Santa Cruz Vegetable Company.

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