Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
picking (and reduces legal issues - tall trees require ladders, which increase an employer's
liability). They are heavily fertilized and watered, which creates the largest volume of the
biggest, glossiest fruit.
Harvest is a combination of military operation and invasion by locusts. Starting at one
end, pickers - almost uniformly Hispanic males - move from tree to tree, nearly sprint-
ing, silent as ghosts. Even though the morning is already warming, they are dressed in
sweats to protect them from the trees and the sun, and they wear baseball caps with short,
dangling capes in back like the French Foreign Legion. There is no playing around; their
concentration on the job is almost complete. They will eventually pick every piece of fruit
they see, tossing nectarines over their shoulders into the big canvas buckets they carry like
golf bags. When the buckets are full, they are emptied into the field bins, and the fruit is
trucked to the packing sheds.
All of the fruit on a tree doesn't come ripe at exactly the same time, of course, but pick-
ing is expensive, so most orchards like this will be harvested only two or three times, sev-
eral days apart. (Most peach and nectarine varieties come ripe only for a period of ten to
fourteen days.) A large-scale commercial orchard may cover 120 to 150 acres and include
dozens of different varieties of peaches and nectarines. In one summer, it may produce
more than 2,000 tons of fruit. Although there is considerable variability depending on the
climate and the year, a little more than 10 tons per acre would be considered average for
peaches, about 7.5 tons per acre for nectarines.
The fruit may be highly colored, but it is not yet ripe. The red coloring is a genetic trait
that shows at a very low level of maturity. A ripe nectarine put through the packing pro-
cess would turn to jam. Instead, the fruit is picked at a stage of physical maturity at which
most of it can, if handled correctly, develop pretty good flavor.
Fruit is graded and sorted according to background color and softness of flesh. The
lowest grade is "utility" and is reserved for fruit that is edible but may be cosmetically
damaged. The next is "U.S. mature." Then there is "California well-matured," which os-
tensibly is harvested at a higher order of maturity. These days, about 90 percent of the
peaches and nectarines harvested in the state qualify for this standard, so you be the judge
as to how meaningful it might be. Fruit can also be labeled "tree-ripe," but this is essen-
tially meaningless, as the maturity standards are the same as for California well-matured.
At the packing shed, the first thing that happens is the fruit is sorted. The bins are emptied,
and the nectarines roll down the conveyor belt in what seems like an endless river. These
nectarines don't necessarily come only from the orchard that was just being picked, but
