Still raising cane: George Wedgworth is a 40-year veteran of Florida's sugar wars

Rural Cooperatives, Sept-Oct, 2002 by Susan Salisbury

Editor's Note: This article is reprinted courtesy the Palm Beach Post

George Wedgworth relishes talking about the time he decided to have a little fun with environmentalists who have opposed the powerful sugar industry in the Glades for decades.

"I told them when the muck is all gone, we will build condos. They'll be gated communities, and we will name them after you. I said it with a straight face. Then I see Charles Lee quoted in the newspaper saying, `We've got to stop this development.'

"I did it to aggravate him," says Wedgworth, 73, who founded and heads the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida. He succeeded. Lee, executive vice president of the Audubon Society of Florida, takes the idea seriously even today. "I'm not sure I agree with George Wedgworth on many things, but on the question of urban development being worse than growing sugar, we would agree on that," he said recently.

Wedgworth can't be blamed for trying to bring some levity to the battles he's fought as chief executive and president of the 54-grower cooperative he began in July 1960.

As its chief, he has been on the front lines of the industry's biggest political, environmental, economic and labor-related battles. Throughout, the co-op has been a stable group, with five of its original board members still serving today.

The co-op's first year, 1962-63, saw production of 77,617 tons of sugar from 21,649 acres. Last season, it produced 373,895 tons from 75,558 acres, about 20 percent of Florida's sugar production. Over that same period, the co-op's annual revenue from sugar and molasses sales has grown to more than $150 million.

The co-op marked its 40th crop year in April.

"I'm a great believer in teamwork. One person can't do it all," Wedgworth says. "It has to be a team whether it's a cooperative or a company."

Wedgworth's perspective is unique among the heads of Florida's three sugar firms. Unlike the bosses at West Palm Beach-based Florida Crystals Corp. and Clewiston-based U.S. Sugar Corp., Wedgworth grew up in the Glades. He was born in Starkeville, Miss., and his family moved to Belle Glade in 1930, when George was two and his father, Herman, became a plant pathologist at the University of Florida's agricultural center.

Within two years, Herman Wedgworth quit his $1,800-a-year job and started his own vegetable farm.

It's an upbringing that George Wedgworth, a 1946 graduate of Belle Glade High School, has never moved away from, despite his success and wealth. He won't disclose his income, but says, "I'm paid way too much."

With labor and trade acumen second to none in the industry, Wedgworth still prefers the simpler lifestyle of an old Florida farmer over that of a sugar magnate. He only recently traded in his early '90s Oldsmobile for a new Buick.

Wedgworth and his wife, Peggy, who met in the ninth grade, live in Belle Glade in the one-story concrete block house George's mother, Ruth, built in 1941. The white, five-bedroom house faces two-lane East Canal Street and overlooks the sugar cane fields and smokestacks of the co-op's sugar mill.

Wedgworth lived away from the Glades only when he and Peggy attended what was then called Michigan State College, now Michigan State University. He graduated with honors in 1950 with a degree in agricultural engineering.

"I just don't know any different. I'm within five minutes of my office. I've never had the desire to go anywhere else," says Wedgworth, the father of four grown children--two sons and two daughters. He and his wife have 11 grandchildren.

Geography hasn't hampered his success

Instead, he and his family, owners of Wedgworth's Inc., the state's largest fertilizer company, with 150,000 tons of "Big W" brand production a year, and Wedgworth Farms Inc., a 5,000-acre sugar cane farm, have made their livelihood from the muck, the rich black soil of the Glades.

Wedgworth's youngest son, Dennis, a Duke University graduate, runs the family businesses. The elder Wedgworth sees to business at the co-op, Belle Glade's largest employer, with 900 employees.

True to his philosophy on teamwork, Wedgworth has done two multimillion-dollar deals with rival Florida Crystals, owned by the Fanjul family of Palm Beach.

Florida Crystals and the co-op last year bought the company that makes Domino Sugar and its three refineries for $205 million. That followed a 1998 partnership in which they bought Refined Sugars Inc., a Yonkers, N.Y., refinery, for a reported $65 million.

"They have a higher profile than we do politically," Wedgworth says of the Fanjuls, "but (the co-op and the family) got a lot in common with sugar."

Wedgworth, with a reputation for being feisty and thorough, believes in dealing with controversy head-on, whether the issue is phosphorus levels in Lake Okeechobee or ash residue from burning cane fields before harvesting.

"He likes getting to the bottom of things," says Belle Glade grower Rick Ruth, 49, a co-op board member whose family has known the Wedgworths for decades. "He's been a true visionary who takes time to understand how all the pieces fit together."