A new cherry harvest system

Today we visited Kyle Mathison's cherry harvest to get ideas on how to manage a picking crew of 60 pickers. This is their staging area where fruit is sampled for culls.

Here is a bin trailer delivering bins from one specific crew out in the orchard. The samples taken will be a check for the percentage of culls and the types of culls. A grower wants to have no more than 20% culls. The packing shed will charge the grower for pulling out culls. This amounts to about $1.00 per pound of cherries.

This clipboard shows the feedback that the samples provide. Types of culls caused by nature include: rain splits, bird pecks, and mildew. Types of culls caused by poor picking include: stemless, punctures, and bruises. If samples from a specific crew show poor picking, there will be communication to the crew boss to improve his/her crew.

This shows highlighted percentages reflecting different crews needing improvement. The categories on this Excel sheet include: Time, Block, Variety, Grower #, C.Boss, # of bins, Weight, Damage, Under size, Stem pulls, Total cull %. If the percentage is 25 or more it was highlighted.

Here we are watching a crew in operation. Each crew had 20 pickers, 1 person to drive the tractor with the bin trailer, weigh and dump the buckets and punch tickets, 1 quality control person who sorts, and checks for spurs on the ground and 1 crew boss.  Our tour guide is in charge of all of the crew bosses. The crew bosses change crews periodically to maintain firm leadership. A picker cannot move to a new tree without the crew boss to approve that the tree is completely picked. In the above picture you can see the scale that is attached to the trailer. A full bucket should weigh 25 lbs (3 lbs for the bucket and 22 lbs for the cherries). After weighing and dumping the tractor driver punches the picker's ticket. Mathison's use craft store punches that are changed daily to a different punch shape. Picker's keep their tickets until the end of the day. They give the grower their original copy of the ticket and the picker keeps the carbon copy. If a picker has had a warning it is recorded on the ticket. Three warnings mean a day to stay home. Four warnings mean find another job. 10 bins with a good crop can be picked in 40 minutes. A picker needs to pick at least 3 buckets per hour. A good picker can pick 35 - 60 buckets a day. They pay $3.30 per bucket with no sorting while picking expectation. The quality control person has a sheet on a clipboard to keep track of pickers performance.

Here is an example of the sheet carried by the quality control person in this crew. Each picker has a section to be graded by harvest performance and fruit quality for each 30 minute block during the work day. Harvest performance includes: full bucket, stem pulls, spurs, clean tree, total fruit picked.
Fruit quality includes: under color, under size, splits, over ripe, wind/frost, bird/insect, total % damage. When the crew fills the trailer an empty trailer on standby replaces the full one and the crew continues picking. At the end of the day, the crew boss collects the tickets. Before the work day begins in the morning the support people of each of the crews meet to review the problems from the day before.
Overall, we were impressed and felt optomistic about our potential capacity to manage a crew of 60 pickers.

Duncan and Felicity were so glad when we got home! Tomorrow we have our last pick of Liberty Blueberries. Stephanie is coming out to pick on Thursday. I'm hoping she'll have time to go 4-wheeling, and see the sights of the farm.

Canning Day

Canning day started like this with a bucket of roma tomatoes.

By noon they looked like this. I discovered I need a new gasket for my pressure canner so these tomatoes had a hot water bath instead of pressure canning. The pressure canner manual stated that I should add 1 tsp of salt which I did. My mom, the Home Economics Major, asked me what I added for acidity. She suggested vinegar or lemon juice. I checked in my USDA canning book, the book I should have consulted in the first place, and she's right. My next batch will have 2 tablespoons of lemon juice per quart and no salt! 

Since it was Natalie's last day we spent the afternoon with good friends at their lake house. The lake is warm enough to swim in, and this pool was great fun. The object with the huge beach ball was to leap on it from the side of the pool, and ride it around. It required precision jumping and a tight grip!

Not easy!

Accomplished by a true athlete! I think farming with a swimming pool is 2 fun!

More chickens

Turns out they preferred the tomato. Speaking of chickens, yesterday I was talking about DPW. I would like to return to that subject after having consulted the expert this morning over coffee. He reminded me that DPW stands for Dried Poultry Waste. I think I called it Decomposed .....So this year this is our main source of nitrogen for both cherries and apples. Our semi loads came from Canada and cost ~$90/ton. Last year we spent a lot more on blood feather meal. We're putting on about the same amount this year 2 ton/acre or 120 lbs of N/acre but with DPW. We'll probably put more on the Lapins in the spring if they stay organic because they don't have a weed strip. We're putting this on all the apples except the Honeycrisp which are showing an excess of nitrogen in the leaf analysis. The grafted Honeycrisp at Last Chance won't need any either.

I believe this is Kate Hudson and she prefers watermelon rinds to tomato worms.
The big ah ha for Bill and I was learning that DPW is a faster nitrogen source than feather meal. The feather meal has a longer decomposition time. It just takes longer going from feathers to nitrogen. But Kate Hudson doesn't have to worry being nitrogen anytime soon. She's really in her prime.

Chickens

As you can see, this tomato worm has the potential to be a large chicken snack. We were curious about how much the chickens would enjoy this snack from Grandma. 

New acquisition

Yesterday we bought this used 1983 Subaru Brat for $1,800. the guy was asking $2, 250 but Bill had the Blue Book value and they negotiated to the agreed price. The plan is for it is to replace the large Chevy that Arturo drives everywhere on the farm. The doors have some rust so we'll either replace them or protect them with a spray on a truck liner substance. Bill's worried he paid too much for it but it's really hard to find a small 4 wheel drive pick up.

Here's a view from the quad down a Honeycrisp row. The crop is heavy so there isn't much head room driving down the rows. I have to drive with my chin on the steering wheel. Bill thinks this will be our second biggest crop. I'm so excited! Among other things I was checking for codling moths.

I found 2 in the upper right hand corner so Bill is having Cuco put on a cover spray to protect the apples. Calcium will be part of the mix as well. We'll be spraying calcium every 4 days because our leaf analysis showed an excess of nitrogen. Too much nitrogen will cause bitter pit so since calcium offsets the nitrogen we're going to have an aggressive calcium spray plan until harvest at the end of September.

Whoa, there is a strong aroma of DPW decomposed poultry waste pervading the cherry block. Here Balta is loading it so it can be spread throughout our cherry blocks. It's the main source of nitrogen we'll be using. Our guys throw it on the trees with shovels as the loaded trailer moves through the orchard. In this way we can customize the amount trees get. The weaker trees get a bigger shovelful. Doing this manually is more expensive but it's made a big difference in minimizing weak trees in the block.




Sweetangos

This crop also looks good. Yay!

I'd love to talk about the Sweetangos but I have tomatoes to can. More about that tomorrow!

Yo, 2 fun farming is not very fun. I have no members. NOBODY has viewed this blog. I'm thinking of going public!

Blueberry Harvest

So far we have harvested 1900 lbs of blueberries. Our packouts have been in the 95% range meaning very little cullage. The birds have not really discovered them for some reason. Maybe they prefer cherries? We'll have one more pick in about a week.

Start Up

The purpose of this blog is to share with you what we're doing on the farm. It's also to have documentation that Bill and I can refer to as we go. My intent is to keep this within the family so I've privatized it. Hopefully, it will work for us!