Tennessee Pearl Farmer Tries to Break Japan’s Monopoly on the Gems : After Long String of Failures, Entrepreneur Grows Money Crops

John R. Latendresse loves pearls. He buys them, sells them, makes them into jewelry. And he is doing what no other American does: He is growing them.

“This doesn’t look much like pearl country,” declared Latendresse (pronounced Lah-TAWN-dress), a flamboyant, 63-year-old transplanted South Dakotan, as he escorted a recent visitor to one of his watery pearl “farms” in western Tennessee. “But one day, the southeastern United States will be the cultured pearl capital of the world.”

That, at least, is his dream. Latendresse--whom National Geographic magazine once described as “as wily, dedicated and opinionated an entrepreneur as any Yankee trader”--has devoted the past 26 years to breaking Japan’s near monopoly on cultured pearl production.

Two years ago, after a long string of failed experiments, he finally produced his first big marketable crop of those lustrous, faintly iridescent jewels that Latendresse calls the “gem of gems.”

The $1.5 million in revenue from that harvest--together with the still unvalued amount from his second big harvest last year--is minuscule compared to the $500-million-a-year output from Japan.

But Latendresse says his counterparts on the other side of the Pacific are, nevertheless, deeply worried.

“The Japanese are not happy with what I’m doing,” he said. “When I was visiting in Kobe, Japan, in 1982, I was asked by the chairman of the cultured pearl export association if I was aware that the cultured pearl business really belongs to Japan--that it was part of their history, their culture and their heritage.

Has 5 Pearl Farms

“I thought real quick and answered: ‘Yes, I am, but by the same token, Henry Ford is part of our history, part of our culture and part of our past--and look what the hell you people have done with his idea!’ ”

Latendresse’s pearl farming business, which he started in 1963 with his first experimental patches, now includes five farms in three different states: Tennessee, Louisiana and Texas. The sites cover a total of 270 acres, with several million mussels suspended in wire nets below the water, silently growing pearls.

“I’ve got a bigger operation than any single Japanese pearl farmer,” said Latendresse, whose headquarters are in Camden, a rural community of about 4,000 residents an hour’s drive west of Nashville. “The only problem is that there are more of them than there are of me.”

Latendresse employs 80 workers, including a highly trained cadre of 25 technicians who perform the delicate task of surgically implanting the foreign matter--or “nucleus,” as it is known in the trade--that serves as the irritant around which pearls are formed in the muscle of the “mother” mollusk.

In natural pearls, Latendresse says, the nucleus can be a shell fragment or a small marine creature like the snail darter that makes its way inside a pearl-bearing mollusk, causing the mollusk to secrete layers of lustrous nacre around it.

“Contrary to what we were taught in general science classes in our high schools, a grain of sand is never the beginning of a pearl,” he said. “If that were so, these animals would be popping with pearls because they are full of sand on the inside.”

For cultured pearls, he says, the best nucleating material is the shells of mollusks harvested from the Mississippi River and its tributaries. The thickest part of the shells is sliced and diced and then formed by a machine into various shapes. The shape of the nucleus determines the shape of the pearl.

Suspended From Pipes

Nuclei also can be inserted in the inside shell of the mussel to form a “blister” or dome (pronounced doh-MAY) pearl, a kind of half-pearl that is a popular gem for earrings and pendants.

From holding tanks at the nucleating laboratory, the mollusks are then shipped in wire nets to the farms, where they are suspended from 40-foot-long sections of floating, synthetic plastic pipes. Periodically until they are harvested--which may be anywhere from one year to three years later--they are inspected and cleaned of algae by workers in flat-bottomed boats.

The farms range in size from a seven-acre site at the nearby Birdsong embayment of Kentucky Lake, which is used mainly for research purposes, to an 111-acre site in Louisiana. At each site, armed guards provide 24-hour security.

While he tried to master the art of culturing pearls, Latendresse built a successful business selling shells for nucleus material to the Japanese through his Tennessee Shell Co., which he describes as the “mother company” of his numerous businesses.

He estimates that he now supplies between 60% and 70% of the 7,000 to 8,000 tons of shell the Japanese use annually in their cultured pearl production. Last year, he says, shell sales totaled $11 million.

“There is no other place in the world the Japanese can get a high-quality shell like we have for their cultured pearls,” he said. “Without America and our mussel shells, the Japanese would not have a cultured pearl industry such as they have today.”

Latendresse’s other businesses include the American Pearl Co., which is involved in the buying and selling of raw pearls, and American Pearl Creations, which manufactures and sells jewelry from the pearls he grows.

Learned From Wife

How Latendresse unlocked the secret of culturing pearls is a mystery he seems intent on leaving as murky as the waters of his pearl farms. According to a published report last year, he is said to have persuaded a group of Japanese pearl farmers to share their secret with him.

In a more recent interview, however, he intimated that he learned the secret from his Japanese wife, Chessy, and her mother, both of whom he says worked in the cultured pearl industry in Japan.

“I guess you could call it industrial espionage,” he said.

But adapting the Japanese techniques to America’s freshwater shelled creatures was no easy task, he says. There were countless experiments to determine such things as how best to implant the nucleus, which waterways to use for culturing and how to supply ample nutrients for the mollusks to survive and grow.

In the end, he says, he scrapped about 90% of what he had picked up from the Japanese and developed his own techniques, which he says are more suitable to working with American pearl-bearing mollusks.

Experiments in Early 1900s

“In our case, we have entirely different animals to work with,” he said. “They have just two species of freshwater mollusks that they can work with, while we have 24.”

One his innovations is his use of pipes made of polyvinyl chloride instead of the bamboo widely use in Japanese pearl farming. He says that the use of the plastic pipes is being adopted in Japan.

The monopolistic grip that the Japanese have on the cultured pearl trade began with experimentations in that country in the early 1900s that resulted in the production of spherical pearls that shortcutted the natural process.

A large industry quickly developed in Japan, dominated by the Mikimoto family, whose name has become almost synonymous with cultured pearls. Over the past five decades, cultured pearls from Japan have almost totally replaced natural pearls.

In recent years, however, according to Latendresse, the Japanese have shortened their growing season to boost their profits, producing gems with such thin layers of nacre that they easily crack and peel. He also accuses them of bleaching and dyeing their pearls to enhance the color and uniformity of tone.

Japanese industry representatives vigorously deny this is so. In a published interview last June, a spokesman for the Mikimoto company derided Latendresse as “just as salesman from Tennessee” and maintained that Japan “still cultures the finest pearls and supplies 90% of the world market.”

Robert Crowningshield, vice president of the Gemological Institute of America, says it is true that “some really thinly coated pearls were coming through” from Japan about two or three years ago. But, he added, the problem with the Japanese pearls seems to have been corrected.

“I purchased some two weeks ago and was quite happy with them,” he said.

He said bleaching and dyeing of pearls is an accepted practice in common use in the industry.

For all his boasting, Latendresse has a long way to go before turning the Southeast into the world’s cultured pearl capital. Although many pearl specialists and dealers have praised his product and encouraged his ventures, he admits that it will take more than the doing of one man to rival the Japanese.

And, at present, he says he knows of no other American who is even close to joining him.

Moreover, the continuing pollution of the waterways of the Tennessee and Mississippi River valleys are a constant threat. He also charges that the Tennessee Valley Authority is killing off the pearl-bearing mollusks with chemicals the agency uses to control algae growth.

Still, he maintains his optimism. “We’re only beginning,” he said. “I may never be any big competition for the Japanese in my lifetime, but I have three youngsters--two in college and one in prep school--who say they want to carry on in my footsteps.”