There’s a regular rhythm to each day, though every day here is different, largely influenced by the time of year, and the day of the week. During the summer, everything is taken up a notch, not just the temperature. There is a lot of produce to water and harvest and only so many hours in the day to get it done. However those two Herculean tasks, tending to crops in the field and harvesting, are just part of what keeps us busy. A huge part of what we do is packing the produce, flowers, and other goods and then figuring out logistics to get everything on the correct truck so that everything arrives to its intended recipient. There’s no point in carefully growing great produce, and harvesting it at prime condition if it won’t get to you, or doesn’t arrive in good condition.
[Read more…]Theme: operations
News From the Farm | October 1, 2018
Full Belly Farm has a lot of balls in the air — we grow fruits, vegetables, nuts and flowers, plus we have several groups of egg-laying chickens and a herd of sheep circulating around the farm. The veggies run from whimsical and exciting experiments growing sesame and garbanzo beans, to the top flight crops like tomatoes (encompassing at least 15 different varieties), melons and watermelons (ditto – lots of varieties), flowers (even MORE varieties) and potatoes… Sometimes the production crew sits down and tries to agree on a few crops that we don’t need to include any more, but everything is someone’s favorite, and who knows, an experiment this year could be next year’s blockbuster! [Read more…]
News From the Farm | June 25, 2018
The new Full Belly ‘solar-powered’ 12.5 acre orchard of almonds, persimmons and pomegranates was mentioned in an earlier newsletter and we’re still just as excited about it as we were 6-months ago when we first turned it on. This week, power and electricity are on our minds because we went without power for 10-hours on Sunday/Monday after a car hit an electric pole, and we are preparing for a “planned” power outage on Tuesday while PG&E does some maintenance work. The unplanned power outages happen fairly regularly. Our power comes in one line up the Valley and when a car hits an electric pole, the entire Valley goes without power until it can be fixed. If the power poles were underground, the long-term maintenance savings would be significant. The “planned” power outages also happen fairly regularly, often during the hottest weather. All of the outages are very inconvenient because our water pumps are mostly electrical, so we have no water, no internet and no power to keep our vegetables cold. Full Belly has invested in several generators that are used for some of our remote pumps, but which we move into emergency service during power outages. It is at times like these that we think about getting solar power that is not tied into the grid. We first became interested in solar because of the environmental benefits and long-term cost savings, but more and more we wish that we could invest in systems like the one in our almond orchard. Our friends at Sustainable Technologies, who designed and built the system, recently wrote the following description, providing additional details: [Read more…]
