We visited mostly berry farms on the first day. Below are a photo of harvest. Strawberries are an winter/early spring crop. Florida starts harvesting in January through March and then California finishes out the season. For those who do not know, there is a HUGE rivalry between California and Florida agriculture. So during this trip, people always had to bring up Cali and say how Florida was better. These strawberries are grown in Plant City, FL, where most of the strawberries grown in Florida come from.
The pickers put the strawberries directly into the store packaging. So really only one set of hands touch your berries before you get them (gloved hands). So be sure to rinse them off, although when the berries are this close to harvest no pesticide/herbicide contact should be made to the actual fruit. This is another reason strawberries are grown/harvested so early in the season, as there is less pest pressure.
The pickers are considered "skilled" as they have to know what ones are ripe enough to pick and do minimal damage to the unripe berries. They are packed into clamshells and brought to this mobile packing shed (pulled by a tractor), placed into cardboard cartons and stacked until large enough to put into a cooled truck and shipped. They can pick I believe (if I remember) up to 10 acres of berries a day! It is one of the hardest fruits to pick and is known as "the devils fruit" as one day of rain and all these berries can be ruined, also its back breaking, people who work the fields for too long in a lifetime can have deformities occur.
Strawberry blossom, the center will be a strawberry and the yellow will become the seeds
Drip irrigation is used to deliver water directly to the plant, overhead is used for freeze protection. Can you spot the plant that isn't a berry?
That is right, they plant Cantaloupe in the middle so when the strawberry season is over, there is a crop starting to produce later in the year! Farmers= Brilliant! (well most of the time)
After these lovely fields we headed over to "the Boneyard" sounds much worse than actually is. This is basically a wholesale farmers market... or what we would call a farmers market. This is where all food safety traceability is lost (at this particular one, not all farmers markets). What happens is people pack strawberries in cantaloupe cardboard boxes. Cantaloupe is known to have salmonella on the outside, now put strawberries in after... and boom, 10 people get salmonella poisoning. You also see strawberries in a companies box, that is definitely not aware of the selling of those strawberries. People break into fields at night and pick tomatoes off the ground and then pack them and sell them at these places.
Boneyard">I would still shop here though, when you see the produce yourself, its rather nice. But this is what big producers fear, as one person gets sick and they can loose millions of dollars on a vendor that has little to no investment in the industry.
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Boneyard">Those look like Cabbage! Not banana's! This is a prime example of the problems with food safety regulations, you cannot account for all these individuals. While there we saw someone load up a horse trailer with produce, most likely bound for a restaurant.
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Boneyard">Selection is unparalleled.
Up next was a citrus packer. It was winter citrus season which I believe is Valencia oranges out of Florida. Most of Florida's citrus is meant for processing, while most fresh market citrus is from California. Florida has seen major loss in crop land due to disease and development. The boom of the 2000's led to many farmers selling to developers... now the groves sit, unattended and harboring disease that can be a major downfall to the Florida Citrus community.
This packing house is outside of Lakeland, Florida. Above is after the oranges are washed and now are being sorted.
The video above is the first half of the washing/sorting. you can see in the far back the bucket dumping the oranges into a chlorine bath, then it is dried and moves along the conveyor...
The video is of the oranges moving through and being sorted, by weight I believe. The woman then slices them in half to check for proper color and make sure they are good through.
Love all the oranges! green oranges aren't bad, they can regreen but the insides are still orange.
This company packs it's oranges in other boxes per customer requests. Above it is packing for Ocean Spray.
Watch how fast these are bagged and put in a box.
the packing line
I have even more orange packing house photos, but I shall spare you the boredom!
After the orange house, we headed over to Sunny Ridge Farms, Mixon Family Farm to check out my personal favorite (wonder why?) BLUEBERRIES. I was a little less interested in them talking but more excited to see a fellow bulldog! One of my committee members was visiting this farm the next day... so it really is a small world.
Southern Highbush blueberry, in blossom and berry stage. There are four distinct types of blueberries: Northern Highbush, Southern Highbush, Rabbiteye, and lowbush. The highbush varitities are the best and most sought after, they have great acid and sugar levels but have a lesser shelf life than rabbiteyes. Rabbiteyes are hardier and do well in warmer climates, and have a great shelf life, but are a bit more on the tart side. Lowbush are mechanically harvested and almost 99 percent of production goes to processing, i.e. blueberry muffin mix. This was a relatively brief stop as we continued down to some grapefruit and orange groves.
We saw several hundred acres of grapefruit and valencia oranges. Above is a grapefruit in bloom, and the smell is heavenly. Light and sweet, it is almost as good as tea olives.
Rows of winter oranges planted east-west. This causes some inefficiency in production as one side of the canopy does not get as much sun and thus doesn't bear as much fruit. So the preferred planting method is north-south, in which most of the sun light is used. These rows stand around 24 feet at the peak.
Blooming winter oranges and the green at the end of the pistil is a future fruit. the end will be considered the blossom end of the fruit, the other end is attached to the stem.
To end our day we ate dinner at Columbia restaurant in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida. Its like bourbon street in Tampa, bars and restaurants. A bit disappointing as I was there on business and I'm not huge on the whole traveling and boozing.... especially on work time. But Dinner was phenomenal. In fact I wished i took a photo of the plate. Spent the night hanging at the hotel patio with some FDA cohorts, all to begin again Wednesday..... yes... I have more stuff for you... but the next day is less intense.
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