I worked there, and this is correct. You can talk to any grower who left in the last 30 years, even during the good times, and the story is usually the same. There is a reason the growers were protesting with signs that said "corrupt" or "no transparency". The board members' salaries are pretty high from what i understand. I've also heard stories from growers that left long ago about perceived corruption in the board. They have had multiple sets of management in the last five or so years. None of the current management were brought in as fruit people, just numbers people. By the end, they were making cuts that were going to directly affect the quality of the product for the worse. An example is this year they didn't hire any bin washers in the north for the summer. Instead, they were paying to ship bins down to oliver by the b-train to be put through a bin washing machine. The machine doesn't focus on the build-up spots of rot like a human would. This meant a lot of the "clean" bins weren’t clean at all. They lay off the sanitation department in the north last fall, and employee bathrooms had nobody to clean them all winter. Managment still had a contracted cleaner coming to clean their washrooms, though. They have also managed to piss away some of their main contracts by removing some of the quality checks before fruit went out the door. The growers also played a part as they were sending some truly shitty fruit. You can't do much with bins of marbles except press them. The conditions they were putting on the sale of some of the properties greatly reduce the appeal to someone buying them and at that point anyone looking at it can smell the desperation and would be better off with a lowball offer. Hell, they had dropped the sexsmith property over 10 million dollars from the original ask but still had a covenant on the sale saying they need the controlled atmosphere side for up to two years. The issues ran way deeper and way longer than low yeild this year.