Savor Yuma Tour

When we got checked in to the park, we got information about things to do in Yuma (including Lettuce Days). There were several options from the Yuma Visitors Center, including a “Savor Yuma Progressive Dinner”. We called and found out that they happened to have two tickets available because one of the folks who had bought tickets was not going to be able to use theirs because of an impending birth in their family – so we signed up to go on Tuesday evening.

I think that the progressive dinner tour goes twice per month through the “season” (November – March). You don’t know which restaurants you will visit, only that you will visit 3 restaurants and have a course at each one (appetizers, soup or salad, entrée) and then dessert on the bus. Part of the fun is the mystery involved.

Our bus showed up and we were surprised to see that we were taking “Fluffie Travel”. Fluffie is the bus driver’s kitty, a Russian blue who seemed to be a bit of a princess!

One of the other passengers asked the driver if his name was Fluffee. He got this page out that we passed around on the bus with information about Fluffee.

 The text regarding Fluffee says:

November 7, 2014

CAT ON A LEASH!

Fluffee Robinson is out for her stroll.

Fluffee is the CEO of Flufee Travel and is walked by her driver, Grover. She does most of her best thinking and planning in the outdoors.

We had a great time on the dinner tour – there were about 35 folks on the tour, and at each restaurant we got to sit with different folks. While many of the folks on the tour were snowbirds, there were also some local Yuma residents, so it was nice to get to talk with them and hear about “their Yuma” -- which includes the 115°F summertime!

There were a lot of other events planned by the Yuma Visitor Center that we would like to take advantage of, but they were all sold out – I have been told that the tours go on sale on 11/1/2015, so I have a reminder in my calendar to try to book some tours for 2016 as soon as they go on sale! Other tours include “Date Night” (an evening event in a date orchard (grove?) with all the components of the meal being made up of some combination with Mehjool Dates), “Behind the Big Guns” to get a "behind the scenes" look at the U. S. Army Yuma Proving Ground, and “Field to Feast” Agriculture tour.

http://www.visityuma.com/

A copy of "Yuma Agriculture Facts and Figures"

At the Lettuce Days, we were given a flyer from YAAC (Yuma Area Ag Council) - it has some interesting facts and figures.

------ extracted from "Yuma Agriculture Facts and Figures" ------
Yuma County, Arizona, is only 7% private land; the remaining 93% is BLM, Native American, Bureau of Reclamation, or State of Arizona. This land is not available, for the most part, for private use.

Water for Yuma agriculture is surface diversion from the Colorado River. The 7 farmer operated irrigated districts serving approximately 175,000 acres of cropland, have the oldest water rights on the Colorado River.

The irrigated cropland grows 2 or 3 crops per year, per acre. The winter crops are more than 75 varieties of lettuce, baby greens, cauliflower, broccoli, herbs, root vegetables, kale, and numerous other vegetable crops. The produce season starts in August and normally ends in early April.

Summer crops or rotation crops include: Sudan grass for hay and seed, hard red wheat, short and long staple cotton, watermelons, cantaloupes, Honeydew, Alfalfa, Bermuda grass for seed, and other crops that fit the April to August growing window.

Other than the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation District, all the water is gravity run from the diversion at Imperial Dam on the Colorado River. There is also a lift plant for the Yuma Mesa Irrigation District.

There are approximately 24 coolers located in Yuma to chill the fresh field produce to 46 degrees. The produce is then held in cold rooms until it is loaded onto one of the 1000 or more trucks a day taking vegetables throughout the United States and Canada. The fresh produce usually leaves Yuma within 24 hours of harvest.

Produce is harvested on a daily basis, 7 days per week during the season. In some cases, harvest can literally be 24 hours a day, depending on delivery contracts.

Depending on the year, there are 30 to 40 thousand workers daily in the fields. Many of our workers cross the border from Mexico daily.Most produce is touched 3 to 4 times during the growing and harvest process. Yuma agriculture could not be the $5 to 6 billion dollar industry it is without the skilled farm workers we are fortunate to have available.

All of the fields are leveled to pool table flatness. All of the irrigation water and agricultural chemicals applied stay on the fields. There is no runoff or tailwater. The on farm irrigation efficiency of the engineered border irrigation systems is upwards of 75 percent.

Use of sprinklers during the August-September planting season for vegetables assure rapid germination of the seeds, improved microclimates for vegetable transplants and reduce the field temperatures from the 115 degrees air temperature to 85 degrees, allowing the little plants to get off to a good start. Use of sprinklers also saves two-thirds of the irrigation that used to be used during the germination process.

Food Safety is the primary concern for our agricultural industry. Whether people, animal, wind blown dust, litter or contaminated water, there is an extensive protocol to make sure the produce grown and harvested is safe. From water testing, field fencing, sanitary harvest with workers wearing gloves, aprons, hair and beard nets, and sterilizing their work tools, and covering loads leaving the fields for the coolers, our vegetables are protected. The harvest aids used in the fields are sanitized every day. Nothing foreign is allowed in the fields.

Food safety is an added expense of about 5 cents per head which pays for irrigation water testing, fencing and 3rd party audits. The AZ Leafy Green Marketing Agreements determines minimum food safety requirements, but all states are differently. The growers started the food safety process, with the government entering the process at a later date.

There are 11 salad plants in Yuma that each process 2 million pounds of lettuce per day for all the bagged products they produce. In the beginning, Iceberg lettuce was the primary variety used. Now, it is a 50-50 mix of Iceberg and Romaine lettuce.

Yuma grows many varieties of seed crops including onion, artichoke, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, and various herbs. Since the average rainfall in Yuma is less than 2 inches per year, it is not normally a factor during harvest.

The hard red Durum wheat grown in Yuma is mostly shipped to Italy for pasta production.

Most of the vegetable crops grown in Yuma are grown on north-south rows. The reason is that for multiple crop rows on a bed, the amount of sun each row receives is equal, making a more uniform crop. Vegetables are an indeterminate crop, meaning that the entire crop does not ripen at the same time, so the whole field can be harvested. An example is broccoli. The first cutting is the crown, multiple heads on a single stem. The next two harvests are the arms, which are bundled with a rubber band.

Melons are planted in February for harvest in May and June. More transplants are being used for melons because of seed costs as well as plant health. With a transplant, the grower knows there is a plant and does not have to worry about seed germination.

Cotton can be planted February 1, depending on the weather. The soil temperature needs to be 60 degrees or more. Specially developed shorter season varieties have been used to fit into the vegetable planting timetable.

There is a great deal of technology used in our area. Fields are laser leveled at least once per year to maintain the pool table flatness. Satellites and GPS are routinely used to lay out field rows, during fertilizer applications and mechanical thinning, and for tillage. Multiple field operations are combined for fuel, labor, and time savings.

------ end of extract ------

You can find more information at http://yaac.net/

Lettuce Days

Sorry for the multiple posts all together! I have been trying to get the KOFA wifi to work well enough to do my blog posts but with no success. So, I decided to use my phone and get my posts done - which means you get several all on the same day.

Yesterday (Sunday), after participating in the worship service here at KOFA, we headed off to the Lettuce Days. What fun we had!

We got to see a lot of tractors and implements (I took pictures for my brother to see!).

How about this baler? And crawler tractor?

There was a guy carving vegetables and fruit...

Ignore the porta-potties in the background...

 And another one carving ice (with chainsaw and other implements):

The event was held at the University of Arizona Demonstration Farm, so they had parts of their fields available so you could walk through them:

This is a lettuce planter - there are 4 seats and someone sits facing backwards putting the seedlings in...

One of the visitors (someone like me, not a professional!) tried the planter - I don't know if you can see the row that she planted - she did a good job!

We also learned that you should clean your greens - even those that are "triple washed".

 The lady who talked with us about washing greens was fascinating - very passionate! She is working with growers to try to deal with incursions into their fields that cause areas to be unable to be harvested. If there is any poop in the field, the plants that are within a 5' radius of the poop cannot be harvested. Some buyers (e.g. Dole, or McDonalds) may have more stringent requirements - she said that one of the buyers demands that a 50' radius around a poop not be used. The biggest issue is bird poop - she said that she is looking into some options - one thing that she said was she was wondering about outfitting a drone to have it look like a predator (hawk) and have it fly a non-regular pattern over the field to dissuade flocks of birds. Another thing she mentioned was bringing in hawks to patrol the fields - even though the hawk would also poop, it would be a single bird instead of a flock.

She also said, though, when the buyer disallows a larger than 5' radius to be delivered to them, although the crop cannot be sold to someone else, nor can individuals come to "glean" the unused portion, the local food bank can come in and get the portion up to the 5' radius.

We also were able to go on an open-sided bus tour of the demonstration farm.

Our tour guide

This is a demonstration field of baby leaf spinach - one of the biggest problems with baby leaf spinach is a disease (I think it was like "powdery mildew") - the growers had asked for help with it, so the university had planted, I think, 70 varieties of spinach, to see which ones might be good options for the growers to consider planting. The convention for the growers had been just within the last couple of weeks - so the growers were brought out here to see what options they might have.

This is the lady who talked with us about the spinach process - she also told us that they had planted a few patches of varieties that are known to be very susceptible to the disease, and they were trying multiple treatments to see if anything was useful to combat the problem.

The open-bus tour took us past several fields - some growing switchgrass for seed (this is a crop that will produce ethanol but is better than growing corn for ethanol because it can grow in a more "marginal" field and thus leave the corn crops for food, - others growing celery (I never would have recognized a celery "bush" as being the source of celery), leaf lettuce, cabbages - at the end, there was a garden where we could "harvest" some crops for ourselves - we got carrots and onions.

There were also various growers who were giving away product - we brought a lot of fruit and vegetables back to KOFA. After sharing with other folks here, we still had a lot left for ourselves!

It was a really fun day!

KOFA Ko-op - Escapees Park in Yuma, AZ

We left Oakzanita Springs just ahead of the colder, rainier (possibly snowier) weather and made our way to Yuma, AZ. I had looked at several Passport America parks in Yuma, but most of them did not allow use of the PA discount between December and March (they are pretty full with snowbirds). I had read the Facebook page of one of the Christian BOF (Birds of a Feather, Escapee's group) folks that we met at Quartzsite and knew that they stayed at Yuma after Quartzsite, and I looked to see where they had stayed, and it was KOFA. So we decided to try it out.

This is a Co-op park - meaning that (as I understand it) a group of RVers got together at some point in the past, bought a piece of property, and each got lots on it. They are called "lease holders". If they aren't going to be here for some of the "season" (I think October - April), they can make their lot available for rent, which can give them some income (I think they get 60% of the rental income, and the park gets 40%). There is quite a waiting list for leased lots - a lot of people enjoy coming here year after year. As with all Escapees parks, the folks are very friendly (hugs are generously provided) and there are lots of activities to do.

The first evening (Saturday), there was a performance by a group of young people (4-14 years old) who sang for us.

I think they were called "Rainbow Group" and were quite cute and entertaining.

Yuma has, I think, about 4 days of rain a year. Two of them have been while we've been here. But the skies this afternoon were gorgeous.

All around us are crop fields (I think the field in those pictures is not currently cultivated). There are citrus groves and lots of vegetables. I will include another post with information about what is grown here.

While we were out taking pictures, we met a wonderful lady named Linda (a lease holder here at the park) who shared two books with us that she has had published. The books are illustrated with beautiful photographs that she has edited and include what she has learned about God and life from the things she has seen. We were able to join her for dinner - we had a great time!

Oakzanita Springs Thousand Trails RV Park

Because of the lack of cellphone and data service at Pio Pico (n.b. we were told by another camper that they had subscription wifi for a reasonable week (particularly if you were staying for 3 weeks) and we heard about a cell phone booster that we've ordered that should help with cell phone service) - we moved to Oakzanita Springs a couple of days early. It turned out to be a very good thing, because if we had kept to our original plan, we would have been arriving to Oakzanita Springs at the same time that the rough weather was arriving.

As it was, we had a couple of nice days at Oakzanita Springs - a little chilly, but ok.

We saw one of the raptors that we learned about at the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum in action - or maybe I should say "post-action".

You can possibly see in the last picture that he has a squirrel. We had originally seen him (her?) in the sky with a couple of ravens after him - I guess they were thinking they could steal his captured prey. Evidently, based on what the ranger (the "host" at the gate of the TT campground) said, squirrels are not very common in that area so she was sorry that it had been killed. Based on how many squirrels we have near our house in Coppell, and the fact that they all have Alzheimers and forget where they plant their pecans so we have little trees coming up all over, I would say, "Go, Hawk!!!"

Pio Pico Thousand Trails RV Park

We had planned to stay at Pio Pico for 3 nights, but we had the bit of a "strange noise" on our way there, and then didn't have telephone or data service on our cell phones, so decided to cut our stay short. However, I have a couple of pictures from there:

There was a beautiful big tree in the pasture behind our camp site.

TJ (The Jeep) and Miss Daisy at our camp site.