Busy times on and surrounding the farm
There is a lot of enjoyment for us with working on the farm when it is quiet except for the amazing sounds of nature.
Most days the quietness is there and it is especially nice in the summer when there is a lot of harvest to be done.
While we are at a high point in harvest so are the big fields around us and they bring in lots of equipment to assist them.
Last week we saw all the tractors and harvesters being set up next to the fields signaling it was about to get busy and the quietness on the farm was going to disappear for a little bit.
Right next to us they are starting to harvest a big field of processing tomatoes.
When the tomato harvester reaches the side of the field it can be pretty loud as they are harvesting more tomatoes in a minute than we can in many hours.
Other than being tomatoes, their tomatoes are very different than ours.
All of their tomatoes go to Dixon to the Campbell plant to be made into tomato paste.
In the spring the California tomato Growers Association agrees to a price with the main canneries in the state for all the processing tomatoes.
For 2026 the price is $104.50 per ton which is $4.5 lower than 2025 and $8 down from 2024.
There are premiums for tomatoes that are brought to the canneries in September and early October after the main season.
Most of the research into developing their tomato varieties and the harvester were done at UC Davis over the last couple of decades.
In addition to the processing tomato harvest that is mostly done by machine there is a big crew of skilled workers in the next field harvesting over 30 acres of watermelon.
It looks like a sea of watermelon plants with every inch covered in green and the watermelon are hiding underneath all the leaves.
When the expert harvest crew comes through, which is critical for watermelons, they unearth so many watermelon and a crew follows them with a tractor and bins loading them up.
Seeing the large scale of the harvest with a crew being brought in along with a handful of tractors shows how much is needed. Once they have finished harvesting the watermelon the crew will move on to the next field of watermelon ready to harvest wherever that may be.
It is great to see the variety of crops being grown around us that increase the rotation between the most important crop a large field can have which is processing tomatoes.
After an early first crop of figs this year the second crop is growing well. We already found one that was ripe but most of them are fully green.
In the hot weather we will continue to have they could ripen very quickly. The figs are smaller than the first crop but prized for packing so much flavor in them once ripe.
Packing just as much flavor in a small size are the cherry tomatoes, especially the sungolds.
The sungolds are coming on really strong right now as the third succession planting has been enjoying the weather and the plants are loaded with tomatoes.
Every week it seems like a different variety of cherry tomato that is part of our mixed baskets steps into the spotlight before another one takesover.
