Thursday, February 10, 2011

Yuma's Agriculture

The harvest of the latest crop here is winding up. I am fascinated about the process of getting the crops out of the fields here. There are several different varieties of lettuce....broccoli.....cauliflower, cabbage and carrots.
Groves of orange, lemon and tangelo trees line the street that runs through Yuma, and covers the land to the south. There are date farms.....and cotton is another large crop produced in the area. We have a great selection of fresh produce.
The semis full of cases of lettuce and cauliflower come and go from the 9 different cooling plants in this area.
We are blessed with lots of roadside farm stands to get our produce and we even have a stand here in the resort. The workers in the fields are basically of Mexican Nationality. They are bussed in daily in white school busses and the have a traier behind their bus with two portable bathrooms.
They pick and sort the produce and load it with a conveyor belt to the bins that are taken to the packaging plants.

The workers are allowed to do business here before they are bussed back across the border at night. Basically the fields are cleaned and planted right back to back.
The main irrigation used is a flooding technique, and they have lots of irrigation ditches but we have seen some sprinkler systems too. Fertilizer is applied with smaller applicators.
I suppose because of the super sandy soil and the super hot summer temps they can grow crops year round here, I just know I like this area because it has lots more green fields and green trees then the desert valley south of Phoenix and reminds me of home on the plains.

No comments:

Post a Comment