The Ranch

So here is the breakdown. At the peak of the harvest, there are four harvesters and two tractors per harvester. Once a load is full, tractor driver A goes to drop it off in the "yard" and get an empty trailor. While tractor driver A is doing that, tractor driver B starts filling his load. If tractor driver A is a good tractor driver, he will make it back before tractor driver B's load is full.

All of my life I have been a tractor driver. This year I trained as a harvester driver in case we needed to move up to 5 harvesters. Well that never happened so I'm still driving a tractor.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of the harvest... The farm is 3,300 acres. The main piece of land is 2 miles long by 1.5 miles wide. The land goes all the way back to the foothills which can be seen below. There is another piece of land a few miles north. We harvest tomatoes for 2 weeks, or more, straight through. No days off. There are two shifts, 5 am and 5 pm. At the peak shifts are 10 hours or more. All in all there will be approximately 61.5 thousand tons, or 123,000,000 pounds, of tomatoes harvested.

The pictures with clouds in them were taken on the "cloudiest" day since I got here :-)