Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
routine. (Despite being friends and farming practically next door to each other for dec-
ades, only recently did they discover that their "secret" watering techniques are practically
identical.) Most of the
time, they rely on beneficial insects rather than insecticides: the bad bugs are eaten by bet-
ter bugs. And those aren't weeds between the trees, but a carefully chosen blend of vetch,
peas, barley, wheat, rye and wild oats that adds nutrients to the soil.
Lange, a tall man who is going a little stooped now that he's in his eighties, bought
his seventeen-acre farm in the early 1970s, when he was at the University of California's
nearby Kearney Agricultural Center. A weed scientist by training, Lange is one of the few
farmers at any market with a doctorate in plant physiology. This tends to lend his conver-
sations a professorial air.
While Kelly talks birds out of the trees, Lange is a gentleman of a few carefully
reasoned, well-chosen words. Like Kelly, he lives in the midst of his farm. But while the
Irishman's aerie is an architectural flight of fancy, Lange's couldn't be more down-to-earth.
He inhabits a one-room A-frame decorated in Early Bachelor Farmer. The walls are lined
with bookcases full of agricultural textbooks, and the floors are stacked with technical
publications. The A-frame looks more like a disorderly cross between a campus office and
a storage shed than a home. "Look at our houses, and that sort of describes both of us,"
Lange says.
Kelly and Lange pick their fruit nearly dead ripe, when it has already begun to soften.
Lange's goes straight from the tree into a packing tray lined with a single layer of individu-
al protective cups. When that is filled, it is taken to a truck, where another worker sorts
the fruit according to size. That is the last time it is touched until it gets to market. Picking
fruit this ripe entails risks even beyond those associated with packing and handling.
When you follow the picking crew, the price of this gamble becomes obvious. Workers
who harvest Lange's famous Snow Queen white nectarines - which can sell for as much
as $6 a pound - seem to leave fully half of the fruit on the trees. Maybe a nectarine is too
small or is split (something the variety is prone to do); maybe it's been gnawed by a pest.
When the fruit that does pass muster gets to the truck for sorting, what seems like another
half is discarded. The closer inspection turned up a bruise, excessive russeting from the
sun or a spot on the neck where it rubbed against a twig. Few of these faults would have
been obvious if the fruit had been picked a week earlier.
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