SPECIAL REPORT: Year-round salad – from Yuma to Salinas

YUMA, Ariz. (KYMA, KECY) - Yuma, Salinas and Huron, California are bound by two unstoppable forces, produce and consumer expectation.

Ever wonder how grocery stores and restaurants have a year-round supply of your favorite produce regardless of the season?

It’s all done through a process called transition and the reasons are climatic.

Director of safety and food safety at Green Gate Fresh, Richard Warsaw said, “In order to provide leafy greens throughout the entire year for the United States, operations like Green Gate Fresh, we will move back and fourth between the Salinas region in California and the Yuma region in Arizona. So we’re in Salinas usually from mid April through the end of November.”

Everything grown in Yuma during the winter is duplicated up north.

Romaine, iceberg, broccoli, celery, cauliflower, spring mix, kale and more all have an alternate season in California.

“You’ve got different components of this move, so you got the farm here, so really this started 130 to 40 days ago with the planting of the crop. So the end of this crop has to dovetail into the start of that crop up there where we’ve also been planting since December, and they have to dovetail in so we don’t have too much or too little crop to satisfy our consumers.,” said Matt Mcguire, JV Smith companies chief agriculture officer.

Salinas and Yuma see hundreds of trucks and pieces of agricultural equipment, sometimes partially taking up parts of the road as companies pack and unpack, and if you spot massive convoys of trucks on highways on an April weekend, you may be seeing this AG transition in action.

“So when we move, right now its about 60 truck loads of equipment, so we’ve got dryers, scales, baggers, cutting equipment, palletizing machines and then other things like bins and film and other supplies, cartons and things that we’ll move,” said Warsaw.

Transition has costs, beginning with the logistical challenges of quickly relocating not just crop but also the increasingly sophisticated technology used in processing what is grown for pre-packaged salads and pre-cut fresh vegetables.

The farm operations making the transition typically shift a crop’s production in three days, usually over a weekend.

“The move itself, takes about two and a half days, three days, so we will shut down on a Thursday and Thursday morning, they start pulling out all the equipment. By midnight that same day all the equipment is on the road. We fly our mechanics to go meet the trucks at the other location, they get off the plane and they get ready to start putting everything back together, so Friday is all installation, Saturday we test, make sure all the belts are going the right direction, all the water pumps are working, chemical injection systems are working, and then we turn it over to sanitations Saturday night. Our sanitation team will work about a 12 hour shift and they clean everything again from top to bottom and then Sunday morning GA will come in, they do about 300 swabs and then turn over the facility to production,” said Warsaw.

And who makes this possible? Seasonal immigrant workers, also known as H-2A seasonal field laborers.

The Growers Company has been using H-2A labor for the last 15 years.

Sonny Rodriguez, president and CEO of the Growers Company said,“The laborers we take up to Salinas are on two contracts, we have 242 who come back in June, the other 303 will stay in Salinas all the way until November 30th.”

Rodriguez continued, “Of course under H-2A we have to provide housing, so about four years ago we built a 600 bed complex in Salinas that we house our workers in, it’s a pretty nice complex and then in Huron we put them in apartments as well.”

“It’s hard on families, it’s hard on the employees but we try to do everything we can to create a family atmosphere, so when you’re away from home you feel like you’re working with family members,” said Warsaw.

So what happens in Yuma when the leafy greens move to California?

“What happens for us down here is we go into our spring crops, so we will be starting melons here in may, dry onions start here in April, so we still got plenty of activity here during the off season, the spring season and the fall season that has nothing to do with winter vegetables and many people forget that, but hey life goes on down here. You can see around here we have durum wheat planted, we have cotton planted, we have alfalfa planted, oats planted, sudan grass planted. All those things have to be harvested and done after the vegetable season, said McGuire”.

And then again in November, transition happens again, from California back to Arizona.

Transition is just another way that the growers, distributors, and shippers in our industry once again prove they will do anything to ensure Americans have the very best produce in the world.