Category: Crops

Oregon Farm Bureau Ag Tour 2013

A few weekends ago I took the weekend off and headed out on the road with other member of Oregon Farm Bureau to learn a little more about what Oregon agriculture entails.  This tour is done every other year and is put on by Oregon Young farmers and ranchers.  The tours are always focused on different areas of the state, as I’ve said before Oregon is incredibly diverse when it comes to types of farming and crops grown.  This year we were in somewhat my neck of the woods.  Only a few miles to the south and a few miles to the west, the amazing thing though is that I saw so many different types of farms, who are right next door to what I’ve always known.

The tour consisted of 3 days and about 15 stops.  I won’t go into all of them but just wanted to highlight a few and share a few photos and interesting facts.  Our very first stop was Willamette Valley Fruit Company.

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  • Family owned company started in 1999.
  • Work with over 20 local farmers to get ingredients for their products.

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  • Produce 2400 pies in one 8 hr shift.
  • The company itself processes over 20 million pounds of produce every year.
  • Their products also include cobblers, 2-pound bags of frozen fruit, freezer jam, jar jam, honey, syrup and fruit snack bars.

IMG_0043Another stop was in Tillamook Oregon, at the Pacific Seafood Company.

  • IMG_0130Pacific Seafood has a restaurant and oyster processing facility in Tillamook.  They process Oysters year round here.
  • Did you know an oyster can filter up to 30 gallons of water a day?!IMG_0135
  • Oysters can be genetically modified and have been for decades.  They found that by removing the sex chromosome in the oyster it will produce even in the summer months, allowing for a year round season.

IMG_0141Our last stop of the weekend was to the nation’s largest Christmas Tree farm!  Noble Mountain Christmas Tree farm is located in Salem Oregon.

  • IMG_0261This farm covers over 2000 contiguous acres.
  • They will plant 550,000 new trees every year.
  • IMG_0234They will also harvest over 500,000 trees every year on average and in only a 25 day window!
  • Their customers include local vendors around Oregon, but also all over the United States.
  • They also sell to Home Depot, Lowes & Wal-Mart.
  • IMG_0231IMG_0233They revolutionized their ability to harvest thousands of trees by adding helicopters into the list of harvest equipment many years ago.
  • They usually use 2 helicopters during the harvest season.

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So there is just a small peak at what we managed to squeeze into three filled days of touring Oregon.  Our other stops included a winery, flower operation, 2 dairies (one with a robotic milker!), grass seed cleaner, nursery, Portland Wheat marketing center, farm market & apple/pear processing facility,  and a beef ranch.  So as you can see it was a busy weekend, but it was also very interesting!

The Slugs are Here

What a row in a baby grass field should look like:

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What it looks like when slugs are hungry and you don’t check the field for 3 days:

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So we looked and looked….

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And found lots of very fat little slugs!

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So that is why I was late posting today…I have been out baiting like crazy!! Happy Friday!

More Hazelnuts, and Planting

We are splitting our time right now between getting the hazelnut crop all picked up off the ground, and getting next year’s perennial ryegrass crop into the ground.

I’ll start with the end of our hazelnut (or filbert) harvest.  We are picking up the nuts from our smallest trees.  The trees are only 4 years old, so they don’t produce like the larger and older trees, but it’s still exciting to have our first crop to pick up ever!  They say that once you start harvesting your trees, the crop will double every year, so next year the row should be twice as large!!  Since I posted a ton of photos of the harvester, here are some of the actual sweeping of the nuts into rows.

008011In this photo you can see he has gone down one side, the sweeper with the brush on the end does a great job of grabbing all those nuts.

010Like I said, it doesn’t look like much, but every nut adds up!

012And finally you get a row to be picked up by the harvester.

Also I have gotten a few questions about our cabbed tractor that is used to harvest…yes it’s very nice to have a cab and no I don’t feel like a wimp having a cab haha!  Here for example is what I looked like when we had no cab…10318_589581412069_5698124_nAnd here is how I feel about being much cleaner and much happier with a cab!!

???????????????????????????????Really can you blame me??!!

We have also been planting perennial ryegrass.  We plant the grass with a John Deere drill, on 12 inch rows.  The planter has nozzles on the back that go over the rows and spray charcoal down over top of the row that you just planted.013014The charcoal serves two purposes.  Not only does it contain a little bit of fertilizer to get the plant some umph to get it up and growing before winter, but it also deactivates certain herbicides that we can spray over top to keep the ground around it clean, and not kill off what we want to grow.

015This is the sprayer that I use to apply the herbicides after planting.  With crops grown for seed it’s incredibly important that you keep weeds out of your field.  And since we are growing a crop that will stay in the ground for a number of years, it’s even more important that you start off the field with a clean slate.  Weeds will inevitably come in, but the sooner you can stop them from growing or kill them off the better you are and the more likely you will be able to save on sprays in the future.

Just like in your own yard or garden, it’s easier to kill unwanted pests when they are small or before they come out of the ground than when they are two feet tall and going to seed to spread and spread.

We finished up planting last week and are still working to get all the hazelnuts in, which should be wrapped up this week.  Phew…I’m sure we’ll be bored by the time this week is over…what to do next??  Trust me, on a farm there is ALWAYS something!