I have been staying at my daughter Marti’s house in a town called Durham near Chico, CA. It is an agricultural community. As you may know one of the biggest crops in California is nuts. Almonds, walnuts, pecans, you name it and there are orchards of these nut trees all over the place. Durham is surrounded by many acres of nut orchards. I have never seen them harvest nuts. It is very interesting. First, they shake the trees and have special equipment that locks onto the tree and shakes it and the nuts come down. They then change that piece of equipment to sweep the nuts into piles between the rows of trees. There are nuts, tree debris, and rocks that are in these piles. Then they come through and get the nuts minus the tree debris and rocks. I watched this happen while I was walking on the bike path next to the road called Midway between Durham and Chico. It was fascinating.
Right next to a portion of the bike path was a row of walnut trees. There was a water line/hose that was under the row of trees and sprinklers. What I saw was a bunch of tree debris, nuts, and rocks and they were under and around the sprinkler hose. I was thinking that there was no way they would be able to get those nuts. Then I see them shaking the trees and a lot more debris and nuts came down. Then they managed to sweep the stuff away from under the trees and sprinkler hose and also had a guy with a blower also moving the stuff to the side. Eventually, they had cleaned out everything from under the trees and hose and made a nice neat pile next to the tree line. That afternoon magically all of the stuff was picked up or at least all of the nuts were gone. I was starting to think of the farmer and his helpers as Marines…you know…no one left behind. In this case, it was “No nut left behind”. They had harvested all of the nuts. I was amazed. Clearly, these guys really knew what they were doing and frankly, it seemed pretty effortless to me.
