Trekin' with the Cartwrights: Field-to-Feast Tour

Yesterday was the first of our 3 scheduled events through the Yuma Visitors Center - the Field-to-Feast tour. http://www.visityuma.com/field-to-feast-agriculture-tour.html

We had scheduled these tours when they first went on sale back in November, and had been scheduling our travel around them.

We showed up at the Yuma Visitors Center at 7:30am and boarded the bus by 8am. The bus was a little delayed in leaving as one couple ignored the directions to be there by 7:30am and didn't arrive until 8:15am, but eventually we were on the road.

Our first stop was the University of Arizona demonstration gardens. Before getting there, we heard from the lady hosting our tour as well as a video about preparations before going into the field to harvest. We had to put our hair up in a hair net, wash our hands for 20 seconds, and then put on plastic gloves. The growers here have implemented these controls as a self-policing activity. After the e coli outbreak with greens a few years ago, they recognized that they had to have practices in place to avoid contaminants being traced to their crops, and particularly to avoid having the government implement practices that they would have to adhere to (they wanted to get ahead of the government feeling that it needed to implement mandates). As a result, they have controls that work and can be effectively and consistently followed.

We were each given a type of produce to harvest for our lunch. Dwayne was given cilantro and I was given spinach. We were given bags and a knife to share for doing the harvest; we found the labeled area and harvested our assigned produce.

We then were allowed to harvest two additional items each to take home for our own use. We harvested Romaine lettuce, kale, onions, and broccoli to bring home.

The Romaine Lettuce that we harvested to bring back home. These tours started in early January and continued on to the one we took (the last one for this season) - so the folks preparing the gardens had to plant so some produce would be ripe and ready to pick for all of that time period.

Some more of the produce area. For the root crops, we had to use a shovel to loosen the soil - they were really in there tight!

Those bins had the produce that we had harvested for lunch. It would be taken to the culinary students at Arizona Western and they would figure out something to make with it for our lunch!

Dwayne sporting his hair net and cap. He asked if he shouldn't also have a beard cover, and they said that if he was a worker in the field, he would have to have a beard cover. In our case, they told him just not to rub his beard on the produce...

Patti has a hair net on under her hat too. And it really was chilly enough that a scarf, jacket, hat, and vest felt good!

After we finished with our "harvesting", a local farmer, Tim Dunn, joined us on the bus to visit some fields and learn some more about the growing of crops here. Tim is a 3rd generation farmer here in Yuma; his family also has farmland in Mississippi. Family members came to Yuma in the 1960s to start farming in this area.

The Yuma County Water District is (I think) the oldest of the documented water rights. In 1904, a siphon was dug under the Colorado River to allow water to be diverted for agriculture. The Yuma County use is the last use before it crosses to Mexico. Since the time that this use was allocated, many other upstream users have been created, putting more and more demands on the limited water. Due to the drought, they are working on ways to use water more efficiently. Examples include: growing 2 crops that require less water (they used to grow a lot of alfalfa, but they don't anymore - now they might grow wheat and lettuce using significantly less water than the alfalfa), using GPS to precisely align fields (flat so the water is used most efficiently - they split 160 acre plots into 20 acre fields and raise the borders so they can precisely water in that area - sometimes the GPS is used to create a pitch on the field), growing greens that require less water (Iceberg lettuce is 90% water). Yuma typically produces produce mid-November through mid-April. The shippers (Dole, T&A) are trying to extend those harvest times out of Yuma due to the extended drought conditions in California. The growers in Yuma are almost all growing to contract - they commit to a particular crop being ready on a particular date. The harvest date is set by the contract - the grower/farmer has to manipulate whatever factors he can to get the crop ready by that date. Making the dates that he has contracted to gives him priority with the shipper (able to get better contracts next year).

After the produce season, Tim typically puts in wheat. The wheat grown here is of particularly high quality and much is shipped to Italy to go into making pasta (Durum wheat). The wheat compliments the schedule for produce because it can be planted as the produce is finishing and will not have irrigation at the end of its growing season so it leaves the fields "dry". It will also then be harvested well in time for produce to be planted in the fall. Again, the growers here grow to contract.

He said that they have to add a lot of nitrogen - I think he said 300 units of Nitrogen per acre.

The Dunn family owns one of 3 grain companies in Yuma. Temperatures in the summer definitely become an issue. He said that up to 105F, that they pretty much just work as normal, but when the temperatures get up around 110F and higher, that they have to take precautions - slow down, take more breaks, etc.

Another crop that is grown in the "non-produce" months is black-eyed peas. They are also processed in his grain company plant. Watermelons are also grown April-June; they want to get them to market early, before other growing areas can produce the melons, so they can get a premium price.

Besides commodity contracts (contract of grower with the shippers), they also have seed contracts. One of the fields that we looked at he was growing seed for a broccoli hybrid. He is growing seed crops for broccoli, onions, chrysanthemums, radishes, alfalfa. When a field is being used for growing seed, it has to guarantee isolation from other fields growing that crop - there has to be at least a 2 mile separation for hybrid development. They are doing natural selection to accomplish the seed characteristics of interest.

For this broccoli field, he is provided with transplants - he first gets the female plants and two weeks later the male plants; they are hand planted. Specific compost and fertilizer to use. 50% of the florets are removed from the female plants by hand. This provides a better germination rate on the seed. They hire a bee company to bring hives to place around the field for pollinating. The male plants are cut down and destroyed (they don't want that seed). Then the female is hand cut into windrows and combined - I think he said that their goal is 99% germination of the seed. I also think he said they use a "105 combine" - he said it was much slower but higher quality - 2 days to combine 15 acres.

He said that land price (I think he said the last land that was sold) was $32K / acre with water rights.

When they want water to irrigate a field, they place an order 3 days ahead for water to be released for their use from the Imperial Dam. There aren't many places to store water so the water master doesn't want to have water come down unless there is a use for it. By treaty, there is a certain amount of water that must be delivered to Mexico each year.

Baby greens only started being commercially grown about 15 years ago; before that, only high end restaurants sold it to their patrons and at premium prices. They had to develop appropriate harvesting and packaging. Fresh Express was the company that figured out the packaging.

The organic fields are hand-harvested and the harvesters get a "piece rate". They make $12-15/hour. The harvesters are folks who come across the border from Mexico each day. It can take them up to 2 hours to get across the border.

As is the case with any farming, there are issues that arise that are totally outside of the farmer's control. One example he gave was when the big snow storms were hitting the northeast US - Yuma was in the midst of producing a great harvest of produce, but (1) shipments could not make it to the northeast and (2) people didn't want to buy produce, they wanted to buy soup. So, in those cases, there are leftovers which may get donated to the local food bank.

He has a special contract to grow wheat for making matzo (or matzoh) for specific Jewish bakers in NYC. There are specific rules for this wheat - at the point where the wheat is preparing for harvest, after their last irrigation on the field, it cannot have rain or any moisture on the field. If it were rained on at this time, it could sprout, and that is not allowed to be used in making the matzo. An individual from a "Kosher Certification Agency" comes in to stay in an RV on the field to be able to certify that no moisture was introduced to the wheat during these critical last weeks. At harvest time, rabbis come from NYC. They certify that the combine is cleaned (he said it had to be cleaned to almost brand new condition, no dust or seed from any other harvest). By Jewish law, they cannot harvest until after noon to ensure that there is no dew (in Yuma in June it is 105F and there is no dew after 7:30am, but the cultural law says harvest must be after noon). The rabbi and the baker operate the combine - each rabbi operates for one "round" of the harvest so they can say to their congregation that they participated in the harvest.
Here is a New York Times article about the matzo wheat being grown in Yuma:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/us/brooklyn-matzo-prebaked-in-an-arizona-field.html?_r=0

Not content to just farm, Tim is an aspiring BBQer too:
http://www.sharedmall.com/page/BBQsDunn-home.html
"It's not dinner 'til the BBQ's DUNN"