Travel for Work: Wednesday and Thursday

So we got up EARLY and left Tampa Wednesday morning and headed down to some tomato packers. These guys don't grow the tomatoes, they purchase them and pack them to specific client standards and ship them to retailers/wholesalers. This is a large industry in Florida. In fact, we went to 3 of these I think, at least.

The plastic bins are what the tomatoes are loaded into on the field, bucket by bucket. Green tomatoes are the only ones picked and it takes a decent eye to know when they are about to turn red. Growers want these green so they can chemically ripen them uniformly prior to shipment to wholesalers... NO tomato bought at the grocery store (except maybe vine ripe and cherries) are picked red. The crop in Florida this year is getting better but the earlier freezes really took a toll on production of high quality tomatoes. The field below I think is in Immokolee, Florida.

So while the tomatoes grow, someone must tie more string to support them. This guy is going up and down the row's tying string up and securing the tomatoes. After the season is over, they pull out all the wooden poles and burn the twine and ground.

Tomato blooms in different stages of maturation

This field was HUGE! literally half way to the end. I have never seen so many tomatoes in my life!

The harvesters. Apparently these people are return workers by 80 percent, come back annually and work for this particular farmer. Since the tomatoes aren't that great right now, they are being paid minimum wage and 10 cents per bucket as extra incentive. When the season is more in swing they will get paid per bucket and can pack around 100 an hour.

At another packing house. Katie is demonstrating food safety to the max!

these are considered ugly and a poor crop. But this is what they look like when the first get to the packer.

In the chlorine wash, prior to being sorted and packed

the sorter! I forget the technical term but this is basically sorting the tomatoes by size. Underneath is a tomato trampoline!
Clewiston Inn">

This is me at the coolest bar ever... well coolest paint job anyway. With my favorite, Bird of Prey! It closed at 9 pm so I had little trouble to get into. The hotel is the Clewiston Inn, and used to be quite the happening place 80 or so years ago. It is in the middle of sugar cane country and sugar producers in America, make money. So it was interesting to stay here, although it had "The Shining" feel to it. It is on Lake Okeechobee where the Muck soils reside.

In the morning we went to see some lettuce and radish production and was suppose to see Small leafy greens but weather did not permit us to see that as a huge dust/rain storm plowed in. The photo above is sugar cane growing in the muck soil, which was established by the yearly flooding of the lake south and west. These soils are black, like my camera couldn't pick up how black they were. And super light, so erosion is a major factor as well as sinking. Every year these are flooded to maintain the soils quality as best as possible. Sugar cane is touted as a helper but... those are from the producers mouths who gain a lot of support from tax payers to keep that industry alive in the U.S.

Here is the muck soil, with iceburg lettuce being harvested. This harvester is interesting, it moves slowly along the field while workers cut the lettuce and put it on a belt, its rinsed and bagged on site. Its usually shipped the same day.

Field of iceburg with some romaine.

Radish in muck soil.

Radish crop. The machine on the right pulls them out of the loose soil and puts them in a bin, to be brought to the packing house for rinsing, cleaning, cooling, cutting and packing. I have a bag and they were delish!

After this we drove to the airport after a huge dust storm rolled in. And got home 5 hours early and had the worst turbulence ever! Sounded like we almost hit another plane mid-flight.... but alas I lived to endure traffic home.