Floyd Remlinger Farm: Friend of the Corn Lover
Published 2:51 pm Thursday, October 2, 2008
Chances are that corn-on-the cob you’ll enjoy at
dinner tonight comes to your table courtesy of the
Floyd Remlinger farm of Carnation
As one of the two major corn packing plants in
the state, Remlinger’s farm is a busy place for the
five-week fresh corn season, which is just about completed
for 1968.
He employs some 34 regular workers, including
field hands, many of them high school youths from
Carnation, in the process of picking corn near Ellensburg
and Yakima, trucking it to the Carnation plant, and
processing it for delivery to Washington and Oregon
wholesalers.
That whole process has to take just as few hours
as possible. The longer the wait before the ear of corn
meets the dinner plate, the lower the quality of corn.
At the Carnation plant, trucks dump tons of corn
on a concrete slab at the end of a conveyer belt. There,
it’s sprayed with cold water until the crew attacks it.
Pulled onto the belt by young women with strong backs, the corn is placed on the belt so that saws on
the right and left trim the shank. Then the corn falls into
a deep refrigerator tank where it takes a 20-minute
swim in water 34 degrees. By the time that bath is over,
the corn has lost all the heat it carried with it from the
field, and is ready for packing.
From the cold bath, the corn moves again by conveyer into a packing shed where more young hands
give it a final culling, then pack it in crates.
The crates move on the conveyer line into cold
storage at 34 to 36 degrees.
On a busy day, delivery trucks move in and out
of the farm six times a day. A busy day means some
54 tons of corn packed and hauled to market in Seattle
and Portland.
“The season is so short, few people have built
the equipment for fresh corn packing,” Remlinger said
last week. “There is another big plant near Sunnyside,
and a few small plants around the state. Otherwise, we’re
it for most of the Washington and Oregon fresh corn
markets.”
This season the Remlinger farm will move some
900 tons of corn, but even this does not come close to
satisfying the market.
“We could sell far more than we can produce,”
he says.
The Carnation grower began packing in 1953, and set up his present equipment in 1961. It involves a
heavy investment in facilities that are then idle for the
remaining 47 weeks of the year.
He plants a few acres of corn around Carnation,
but the bulk of it comes from owned or leased fields east
of the Cascades.
Under proper conditions, the corn takes three
hours to reach Remlinger’s packing sheds. Under best
conditions, it is packed, delivered, trucked to retail
markets and in the hands of a Fall City or Portland housewife
18 hours after picking.
Among Valley young people working on the corn operation this season are Pat Engle, Sunee Sadlier,
Sue Knutz, Jan Colgate, Pat DeBoer, Kathy DeBoer,
Sherri Colgate, Rod Thompson, Randy Profitt, Richard
Waiten, Roger Johnson, Larry DeBoer, Suzanne Jones, all
of Carnation, and Mary Louise and Karen Larson of Snoqualmie.
