Farm City Celebration: Visitors get bus tour of…
Farm City Celebration: Visitors get bus tour of farms in Butte, Glenn counties
Visitors walk past a baby cow pen during a tour of the hospital barn at Goedhart Dairy in Orland on Wednesday during the Farm City Celebration in Glenn County. – Bill Husa — Enterprise-Record
By Heather Hacking | Columnist
PUBLISHED: November 9, 2016 at 8:42 pm | UPDATED: April 20, 2018 at 5:49 am
It's not often that people have a chance to stare at the business end of dairy cows, watch almonds zip through sophisticated equipment, or ask any and all questions they may have about pistachios.
Yet, Wednesday was Farm City Celebration, when 250 people piled into coach vans for a tour of local farms.
Dairy action
With three milkings a day, and 1,400 cows with heavy udders, Goedhart Dairy in Orland is almost always busy. During several tours Wednesday, Farm City Celebration travelers watched as Holstein cows moved in an orderly fashion to a concrete milking area. The cows positioned themselves into stalls with very little nudging. Next, mechanical milking equipment was attached to each udder. The system was designed so all is within easy reaching distance, explained dairy owner Gilbert Goedhart. He wanted his crew and family to avoid leaning down to reach the milking height.
During the tour Wednesday, visitors watched from the lower level. As milking ended, each cow wiggled its back side until the milking apparatus shook off easily. After several sprays with disinfectants and jet streams of water, a new batch of 50 cows was ready to show off for the crowd.
The dairy is located near Roads 31 and P in Glenn County, a location Goedhart researched when he made his move from Hickman in the early 1990s. He said he doesn't buy new animals. The herd is refreshed through new births created through artificial insemination. Male calves are kept for a short amount of time before being taken to a feed lot, he said.
Surrounding the milking areas are green fields, where corn and oats are grown, as well as purchased commodity by-products and grain.
Nuances of pistachios
Ken Kaplan has been farming since 1972, after studying the art of raising trees at UC Davis in the mid 1960s.
He and his son, Ryan, grow about 300 acres of pistachios close to the Sacramento River in Glenn County, as well as 180 acres of walnuts and 30 acres of prunes.
Pistachios are very different than other nuts, in that the shell and outer casing is formed first. About July, the nut inside the case begins to fill in, Kaplan explained. The plants bloom is in April. The Lake Ranch Pistachio farm is owned by 22 investors, who waited more than a decade for their investment to begin to pay off. It's typical that trees will begin to return on the investment after 15-16 years.
Kaplan said there is a lot of protocol for nut harvest. For starters, the shell begins to open, which means the nuts cannot touch the ground. This makes for a very hygienic harvest and processing system.
Once harvest begins in September, the pistachios need to get to the processing plant as soon as possible, at a facility in Bakersfield.
The nuts grow in clusters, Kaplan explained, similar to grapes. When nuts begin to form in those clusters, the tree borrows nutrients from other parts of the tree. That's why the tree has a nice, big batch of nuts one year, and a very small batch the next year.
Farm City tradition
Farm tours similar to the one this week have been part of Farm City Celebration for 35 years. Farm leaders sell tickets and recruit farm experts to ride along in the coach tour buses. People can ask questions while groups travel to each tour location. At the end, about 250 people gather at the farm pavilion at the Chico State University Farm on Hegan Lane. The event is one of many held each year to help people locally and from out of town learn more about the farms in the Sacramento Valley.
Nut crops are near the top of the lists of commodities grown in both Butte and Glenn counties. After nuts are shaken from the trees, a lot of work remains to get those nuts to buyers.
Riverwest Processing
Visitors to the almond processing facility watched the smooth progression of raw nuts that are cleaned, graded, sized, weighted and packaged for shipping. Sophisticated equipment help to sort each nut four times, including scans for insects, scratches and other defects, explained Jon Taylor, general manager at Riverwest Processing. From Glenn County, about 70 percent of the nuts are exported, often in large containers or on pallets stacked with sacks.
Dried plums are the most common product of Sunsweet, which has a drying facility just across the river in Glenn County and helps with crops from 250 growers. The equipment in the neatly-arranged yard is only used for 2-3 weeks during the height of the receiving season, explained Dan Lima and Mark Giles, during Wednesday's tour. The company, founded in 1917, represents a third of the prune market worldwide, and is run as a grower-owner cooperative.
Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District
Most of the 140,000 acres of land within the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District is farmed in rice, for a total of 100,000 acres. Another 15,000 is planted in orchards and the remainder in other crops, explained Don Bransford, district board member. Also, three wildlife refuges receive water from the elaborate irrigation district formally organized in 1920. The district dates back to 1883, when Will S. Green first tacked a notice on a tree, staking a claim for the area where crops would continue to grow for generations. Bransford said the total water rights provide 825,000 acre feet of water.
One acre-foot of water is 325,851 gallons, or enough water to cover one acre of water one foot deep.
Those water rights are among the oldest in the state and provide consistent water supply. Last year, after several years of drought, the district's supply was cut by 25 percent, Bransford said.
Glenn-Colusa's biggest project has been the $85 million fish screen, which was located behind Bransford as he talked with groups along the edge of the canal system. The project is the longest flat-plate fish screen in the world.
The district also recently finished the Painters Riffle in Redding, where a former side channel to the river was re-sculpted to allow fish to feed in an area outside the main river.
Contact reporter Heather Hacking at 896-7758.
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Heather Hacking
Garden enthusiast Heather Hacking loves when you share what's growing on. Reach out at sowtheregardencolumn@gmail.com, and snail mail, P.O. Box 5166, Chico CA 95927.