AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Breakout Session 6

Brad Johnson

Post Harvest Handling

So good afternoon My name is Brad Johnson and I with my wife Farm in Gridley, California with woolly Farms and I've lived there all my life.

I've been farming on my own of some type since about 1976 and Judy and I, my wife, farm organic walnuts, sugar plums, the prune plums, mixed vegetables, and we also farm conventional peaches with and sugar plums with my brother and sister-in-law in the same area.

So today I have a topic that I'm gonna talk to you about is post-harvest handling.

Every human being Created in the image of God is endowed with a power akin to the Creator, individuality, power to think and to do.

My point being, we can all figure out ways to do things.

My thought in this, just like make this thing work in the right way, my thinking about this is what happens to the fruit after it is separated from the plant or picked and how do you get it to the market in good condition or package the way it is wanted.

To clarify my qualifications on this topic I'm not an expert educated by the book as a produce handler.

There are books the internet and universities for that what I will be showing you is some of what we do and Our personal experience of how we handle our products primarily our vegetable crops We also harvest sugar plums dried prunes mechanically and outsource the drying and pitting as well as walnut harvest.

We outsource the hauling, drying and shelling.

But we hand pick, oh I'm sorry, we we hand pick or at times machine pick our peaches and Ship them to be canned at a commercial canner, but we are daily involved in harvesting cooling packing shipping our vegetables to wholesale markets Over the course of years we have grown for market many kinds of fruits and vegetables with many unique needs for handling.

The details are a bit numerous to cover in this bit of time we have here, but I'll try to answer your questions, whatever questions you may have as well.

Our operation is relatively homemade and much of it has been learn as we go.

We've been growing for market various vegetable crops with many varieties within these kinds.

Watermelon, melons, tomato, eggplant, squash, okra, peppers, beets, cabbage, kale, turnips, basil, and a few other miscellaneous types.

We have evolved in our knowledge and infrastructure from shade tree to current state.

Those of you who have a lot of money, I guess can build it by the book.

Ours is over time and as we can and still not right.

I'll be running through some photos and speaking to aspects of our operation pertaining to harvest slash post harvest both being related to this topic.

In other words what we do to pick the fruit, get it to market in good condition, then we'll have time for questions or show more pictures depending on the time.

Perhaps you can make some notes if you have questions so I can kind of manage my time for this.

Not really sure how this is gonna land time-wise, but I think we'll have some time for questions.

I don't know if you see, you don't see my mouse on there, do you?

Okay, so just a little thing in this picture about our packaging.

You can just quickly wrap it cinch it right on So we use those to hold these corner boards which we place corner boards on the corner of our pallets to kind of tie the whole package together and then We use new boxes and generally new pallets I'll talk about the brown paper later.

So 1 of my goals, 1 of my early goals was no carts in the field to increase speed and efficiency of Harvest and move product to be cooled and packed faster though there are systems for hand picking Fresh market tomatoes without carts.

We've not risen to that scale except when we grew Determinant varieties which we no longer grow This happens to be a squash field So don't don't be deceived.

You know these are not tomatoes But we pick squash Sometimes early on before we start our machine or with our mechanical system with carts just because there's not that much fruit to start with it's quicker to go through with carts.

So our plan instead is to continue to modify our carts for tomato picking with overhead shade covers for the fruit and people similar to our conveyors and conveyor wagons Meaning adding a top shade cover to the carts for the afternoon Sun.

These are a few of our cart styles We've kind of various types we've used over the years So What I'm talking about is adding extensions up on these carts and putting an overhead shade canopy So when we go down through these rows in the heat of the day overhead all of our fruit is covered With from the Sun because We get very hot days in the summer and it'll scald that fruit even the short time.

It's in the picking box This is just an intermediate shade area we put together If we have the wagons not there We're using boxes to kind of shade stuff So for our homemade conveyor harvest system We've designed our field layout with 9 row sections about 50 feet across so from here to here Planting to bed plant and cultivate 3 rows at a time and put our roads between sections allowing our conveyors to reach halfway across for picking.

Here you can see our roadways between, so This would be a road and this would be a road.

Now currently we're using, we're putting in 1 bed at a time.

But the reason I did it with 9 rows is because my long term is bedding and cultivating and putting up 3 rows at a time just for speed.

So this allows us to move product from the field to shade quickly and gives the added benefit to shade workers and conveyor with umbrellas or such things.

So we made this conveyor out of scaffolding from Lowe's.

We've made other ones from aluminum ladders and another from scrap electrical wire scaffolding.

So it's powered by hydraulics from the tractor and we use TechShield plywood and regular comp roofing cuts the heat that covers the trailer.

The conveyor can swing back parallel on the trailer for roading.

So this has a pivot point right here, and we can swing this whole thing back against the trailer So this is more pictures of how this works, so we're picking with no carts putting the product on the belt The the product comes in to the pack shed Or to the pack trailer, and then we're in this case.

We're doing cucumbers here So we feel pack at this point and then the boxes go into a bin right on the on the Picking wagon and then we can handle that with either a bin carrier or a forklift To get it off or we can just haul it right in with the trailer to the pack shed that way and unload it Without handling the boxes again It works well for eggplant watermelon zucchini ambrosia melons and short steak tomatoes or whatever else you want to imagine you can do with that.

We use moist burlap on top to keep the produce covered and hydrated during transport.

So this is the moist burlap I just pulled it off here so I could get a good picture of the eggplant In the bins so you could see see what fruit we had in there So we modified these trailers from obsolete tomato wagons when sauce tomatoes were hand harvested in bins they have roller conveyors right along underneath or with this bin skid slides and work well for bins and forklift handling.

We added the top and the sidewalk along the edge and even though it's not pertaining to harvest these wagons may provide a very good way to stake our tomatoes efficiently because we can put all our stakes on here, we can pound our stakes downhill without any lifting you know when the stakes will be this level rather than this level to put your stake pounder in or whatever however you're putting them in.

So here's another style we use it's a low profile which we really like this trailer easy to get on and off we're adding collapsible extensions this year so this this little extension right here we're putting on another 1 on the other side and We use this mostly to field pack our zucchini and this is incredibly helpful on hot days.

I mean If you're looking for Some shade this is in the field this has been phenomenally just phenomenally good job It also works well for hay rides.

So here's a group of friends that we, you know, we'll take people on a trip around the farm and this is just a good way we'll throw some bales of hay on there and it's just a fun way to do it.

So 1 of our coolers here is a diesel engine truck cooler and we use this for volume overflow and because we don't have enough electricity.

But it can be difficult in and out because first in is last out.

And on very hot days, it seems like it needs more airflow to keep the engine running.

This other 1 here is a 40-foot reefer box, very thick insulation.

And we put this little, we don't use this big unit here.

We just put this little Ac window cooler in here And you can I've heard you can modify the thermostat on those things and get them to draw down more.

But we just, we use it for like dried fruit or wax boxes in the summertime.

So we don't use it as our main cooling, but it does keep the wax boxes from melting and sticking together, or the dried fruit doesn't need as much cooling.

So we can keep it about say 50, 55, 60 degrees in there kind of keep the door shut we aren't in and out of that very much.

This 1 here is an earlier box we used when we started with a little milk truck and now we just use that for storage.

So you know we're like I say we've just kind of tried to pull things together over time as we could.

And for example, these cooler panels, we bought this whole stack and all the hardware to go with it for about $500.

And these are 18 to 20 feet long and this is 1 of the coolers we made out of it.

So I just, we put this up kind of like an erector set and we used the, I just consulted with a compressor and condenser manufacturer and built it with what we could.

We use the same panels for the roof and the doors.

So mathematically, We do not have enough electricity to build a to build coolers with all the cooling capacity We need so in order to expand and even do as much we need to do with these we need more power So lack of electricity limits our growth It's maybe not the only thing but it's definitely a factor.

I don't know if you've ever consulted with a reefer, somebody who does refrigeration.

How much heat you're coming in with, how much you want to cool it to how much time you want to spend on it and It's all tied to the amount of electricity you want to run and how big your compressor is So we consulted with them.

They say you make some machines from this end it's feeding that wash line and dumpers onto the belt going this direction and then this is you know going down the same way and then it circles back around and makes a continuous flow just like a circle so it just handles multiple products you know here you can see we're doing watermelons here down here we're doing apricots and then there's a takeaway line takeaway belt right here that just float runs so when you're packing You can put your number 2 or your discards onto this exit line And it'll go down to this little tub down here And then we do another pack down there for number twos or discards That kind of helps you just sort stuff out as you're packing because that's always a dilemma what do you do with all this stuff when it's coming through you know and then it's a way to organize our boxes so our boxes have a Rolling conveyor up top here, so we can put all of our empties Accessible to when you when you fill a box You can just grab another 1 and then this roller conveyor then moves the boxes The other direction same direction out to the to be palletized So basically our fruit comes in from 1 direction the package head gets packed and moves out the other side Breaks down into normal compounds So we use that for a zucchini Normally we feel Packer zucchini and this year we brought them all in and we in the box just like this We just dip them in the tank box and all and just dip them and pull them out and then palletize them.

They like, you know, we'll use them, we'll wash them, we wet them down.

I mean, you know, I think you could overdo it.

I think we normally overdoing that we run into is If we wet them too much and our boxes aren't a high wax content, they'll, or if they haven't sealed off the flutes or whatever you call them, those holes, there's a way they dip those boxes.

And if they're not dipped the right way where they close Off all those holes on the box the water will get inside and collapse the box So if you want a really good wax box that's what you want you need to close all those holes off And then you won't get any saturation in your box because when you stack those pallets up your bottom ones start collapsing And you can't use cardboard At all I mean we use wax for all those.

He's just we're not washing them We're working on that.

We started doing that normally we feel pack We come bring them in the pack shed We'll open every box Because there we weigh them in the field we pack and weigh in the field and the only thing we do in the packs yet Is we will add do we add the PLU stickers and the pack packs yet?

We don't stick every fruit we peel off just like you saw there.

We peel off a little strip Throw it in the box Spray it with water We put wet paper these wet paper on top and bottom and then we seal it up that kind of holds a little bit of Humidity keeps from drying out because they will dry out in the cooler if you don't you know if you hold them very long And so we try to keep those more humidified than than dry So anyway, that's kind of what that is So I know this is kind of a busy slide here, but I threw it in because You know I I know we're relatively.

I mean not everybody's doing large volume agriculture And we aren't either necessarily, but we have at times.

We've been we've used so this is a high-capacity machine when we were doing a lot of produce and we picked this up from another grower and It's an optical sizer, so it's computerized It's originally made for potatoes, and we used it for eggplant squash cucumbers, but it can be adapted to other things So it has optics that sees all sides of the fruit and tells it where to go and get off the belt onto another conveyor and be packed.

You know, 1 another aspect I really like about this machine, because this isn't, this is also a married machine.

Is the the pre-sorter helps organize and grade the fruit and we've not, we haven't used it for a number of years so it just takes up space right now so we're gonna put up, put on the market.

Dan Hutton

Sea Minerals

Thank you for this opportunity to come together and learn a little bit more of the wonders that you have created that seem to fly under the radar sometimes, but at this conference, they're pretty well lit up.

But Lord, give us wisdom and understanding and to appreciate everything that you do.

My name is Dan Hutton, and I take care of a ranch, and I have a garden, and so I know a little bit about gardening.

Last year, I went to the agriculture conference they had in Tennessee.

And I met several people, and I learned different things that I had never, I didn't know much about.

White method of planting trees and he's actually better at this presentation than I am, but we're trading off.

Well, first off, what, when you think of food and you think, what can I do to make this food taste better?

What do you add to food to make it taste better?

So we're gonna talk about 1 of those things that what our bodies like is salt.

We like salt and we're going to talk about how that affects the plants.

And the other thing that I learned at the conference last year, and I'm just gonna barely touch on this, that sugar, which we like, we love, is also good for plants.

And when you make, okay, do people know what molasses is?

When they make sugar, they take the beets or the cane or the sorghum or whatever they're using and they beat it up and they take off the liquid and then they refine it and they refine it and they end up with white powder, or white crystals, and that's not meth, I mean, Coke.

But they end up with white powder that we eat as white sugar.

And everything else that they refined off of the liquid, it becomes molasses.

They take all the good out and they leave, and we get all the bad, and the good is in the molasses.

It has, it's high in all the nutrients, or most all the nutrients, and it's very good.

And when you put it on the soil, when you're adding, you have micro life, you take a soil sample, you determine, I need to add this element and I need to add this element and I need to add this element.

And then you add microlife, zehume or humate or various kinds of humic acids and other forms of microlife.

The molasses is food for the microlife and the microlife then eats on those nutrients and makes the nutrients available to the plant.

So if you feed the micro life, it feeds the plant.

Now that's just a little introduction to the subject.

There's a lot more to it and we're not gonna go, unless you have questions, we'll touch on it more.

In the 1930s, There was a fellow by the name of Maynard Murray.

And Maynard Murray was a physician in Boston.

And He would watch when the ships would come in, and they'd unload their cargo, and he'd see the creatures that they'd bring in.

And he was noticing that they didn't have the diseases that he was seeing in the hospital.

He would see all the different kinds of diseases people get, and he would look at the sea creatures, and they weren't getting those diseases.

And he was putting things together in his mind that something's going on here, I want to learn more.

So since he was a physician, he hired himself on as a ship's mortician.

And he went all around the world on A78 months, and they'd bring creatures in, and he'd cut them open and look for diseases and he didn't find any.

And 1 of the things that they did, which totally incomprehensible in our time, but it was common back then, is that they'd catch whales.

And so they brought on a whale and a baby, a mother and baby.

And he cut them open and went looking for any problems or diseases or anything.

And the baby was about a year and a half old.

And the mother, it was guessed, was approximately 80, 80 years old.

And he was comparing the flesh of the baby and the mother and there was no difference.

There was no sign of aging in the mother's tissues.

It was like, you don't get older, you just get bigger.

So they did, they tested the sea water and they found out that there are more than 90 different elements in the water And they are in a precise balance.

And if you go, what I understand, I'm not a, okay, first off, I am not a chemist.

So I don't know all the chemical interactions of the different things.

I know what I've been taught and I know what I've experienced, but I'm not a chemist.

But they say that there's a precise balance and you go anywhere in the world and you find the same balance in the ocean.

Not in bays, not in river inlets or outlets, but in the big ocean you find pretty much the same balance wherever.

And as you know, all over the world, you have things high and the water takes it and takes it and takes it and everything eventually ends up in the ocean.

The elements, whatever was on top of the mountain ends up in the ocean.

And then when it's in the ocean, the ocean goes swish, swash, swish, swash, swish, swash all day long and all night long and the things that God created a balance for the ocean which is very close to the same balance that we have in our tissues.

In our fluids, our blood and the other body fluids have just about the same balance as the ocean water.

And that is also just about the same balance as the ocean water.

And that is also just about the same balance as the plant sap.

And so if you take the elements from the ocean, now there's a point, and this is important.

If you go and drink ocean water, you will not do well.

But if you dilute it 10 to 1, half gallon to 5 gallons, well, that's a lot of water, but that is the same ratio that is in our body, is that when it's diluted approximately 10 to 1AM I on close?

Okay, we've got, the Water is good for us.

Lynn tells a story that he had a peach tree.

And he put in this peach tree had peach leaf curl.

Does everybody know what peach leaf curl is or does?

And in a severe case, it will kill the tree.

So Lynn took 1 ounce of sea mineral, sea salt.

Sea mineral, sea salt, sea solids, those are interchangeable terms.

And he dissolved that in hot water, warm water, and Then he slushed it all over the tree.

And then he did that 2 more times over a period of time.

So after 3 times, all the curly leaf fell off the tree, and new leaves came on.

And then when the tree was ready to produce fruit, the fruit was spectacular.

Whitmar McConnell

The Growers Purpose

Father in heaven, we're thankful for the refreshment that we've enjoyed and fellowship as well.

Once again, we ask for your presence that you would give us understanding and wisdom.

Okay, does anybody have any questions about this?

You can get this off of their website, advancingecoag.com.

If you were to search his name, we would probably bring up the website too, John Kempf.

All of the criteria here though are dependent upon complete and balanced soil construction.

That's how you achieve these things and that's how, as you climb up that pyramid there, and you begin eliminating those problems, I like to look at it the other way, you're actually gaining more life.

I always tell people that we spend too much time fighting off death and too little time fostering life.

This is going to start sounding redundant to you, but the causes of weeds are incomplete and or imbalanced mineralization, and inappropriate porosity and or capillarity in the soil.

Well, let's take some weeds maybe people would be familiar with.

I mean, most of you are familiar with dandelion.

And these books over here help to, help you to understand what the conditions are that cause certain plants to grow where they grow.

We call them a weed, but in some cases, they're really there to try to heal the land.

And that's actually the case with dandelion.

In the situation with dandelion, you have low calcium.

You have poor digestive process going on.

The biological process in the soil is breaking down.

The calcium level's low, and dandelion, does anybody know why dandelion is such a good green to eat?

It's a deep root, but why is it that dandelions, High in calcium.

Dandelion can mine calcium where it's difficult for other plants to get it.

And so when you see it taken over your yard, it should tell you that you're lacking calcium and you're lacking structure in your soil.

And We could go through a lot of different illustrations of weeds.

I encourage you to get these books and start learning what are the conditions.

But you'll see that it always comes down to, in that case, there's a lack of calcium.

And you don't have the right structuring of the soil and there's other When you have high potassium and high magnesium, you'll see we you'll see thistle type weeds you'll see bindweed And some of those types of things starting to proliferate in the soil Because they can mine calcium as well, and they can deal with that tighter soil even better.

We had an alfalfa field out at Eden Valley and the dandelion just came in and took it over.

It was because there wasn't enough calcium there.

And we were already naturally high in potassium and magnesium so.

Yeah, it mines calcium and accumulates it.

And so when it dies, when the dandelion dies, it leaves more calcium behind.

So what plant, we call them weeds, but what plant will show up there will be dependent on what the overall situation of the mineralization and the structuring is.

Because there may be another plant that will show up, but because dandelion can't even compete in that type of condition.

But another plant that can extract calcium, but in a better way than the dandelion can, might come along and succeed in that area where your crop won't.

If you can grow a crop that's an accumulator of a certain nutritional element, there's a whole, you know, God created variety.

There's 12 manner of fruit on the tree of life.

And they all express in unique ways the image of God, the character of God, what the character of God is like to us.

I don't know about you, I love growing fruit.

Most people have gotten used to what they get in the grocery store, is fruit.

You haven't tasted fruit until you've tasted it grown on nutritious ground or on mineralized ground and let ripen on the tree.

This is another problem is where they pick it off immature so they can hold up to the whole shipping process and handling.

It's not even ready to be able to provide you with all of the...

I think my wife, She was in Belize with her parents as missionaries, and she doesn't really care for mangoes and things like that, avocados and everything she got there.

She said, we pick them off the tree, the avocados, and they were more of a golden green.

They weren't, because they were ripe, and you cut them open, and sometimes they just drip oil out of them or mangoes that were completely ripened on the tree.

And most people, their expectations have come to be so low because of that.

You go to the grocery store and what we call food today, you know, I've been largely, it's probably aged me 10 or 15 years in 3 years, but I've been largely without my own food because I've been so tied up in this transition thing that's taken a lot more time than we planned on it taking and everything.

Did you ever notice the proliferation of the energy drinks?

It's where again, where I said before, where there's a substitute of stimulation for nourishment.

It's covering up the fact that we're malnourished, that we're dying, really.

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Series

Breakout Session 6

Post Harvest Handling

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Post Harvest Handling

24m

Sea Minerals

36m

The Growers Purpose

46m

Growing Transplants

1h 16m

Sound Doctrine