Watermellon Harvest

Starting out in the in the spring, we mark out our fields and we actually plant a wheat strip in between each row that helps for wind protection. Come harvest time, we'll get a seal out of those different practices. First thing, we have a crew that goes through and cuts them and they decide which watermelons are ripe and ready to go and they'll roll them over to make them easier for the next crew identify. And then as they come through, we pick them up and put them on a conveyor that we have and that loads them, does most of the work for it, loads them up into the trailer, and then they pull them up and pack them into the trailer. And then we bring them back here into our yard where they're unloaded again by hand onto a conveyor sorting system in sideways and sorts them according to their sizes. And then we pack them in bins according to their size out there. And then we we store them here in our facilities to await shipment. Without the H2A program we couldn't do this. Each crew has16, we got about 30, just over 30 employees overall. Most of our stuff comes in, sits about one day and goes out the next day. And some of those that go to a distribution center, they might sit there for a couple of days before they make it out to the stores, and then by the time the store has it for a few days and the consumer picks it up and pretty much used up its whole life. So the quicker we can get them out there, the end product is a lot better for the consumers. And then we run a local delivery route as well throughout Idaho and Wyoming into Utah. And those, of course, skip the whole distribution center step in so that that much fresher.