Natural Perspectives:

While Vic was busy teaching his college biology and birding classes, I took off for several days in Monterey with the Photographic Society of Orange County. While Fisherman’s Wharf, sea otters and sea lions galore were wonderful, the highlight of the trip for me was an agriculture tour of the Salinas Valley.

Club members Stefan Steinberg of Huntington Beach and Dave and Wendy Hill of Irvine went with me on the tour. Agventuretours owner Evan Oakes took us on a terrific tour that focused on the photogenic. Our first stop was a bulb farm that raised tuberous begonias. My eyes boinged out on springs like the eyes of a cartoon character at the rolling rows of brilliant red, pink, peach, orange and white begonias in flower.

But mostly we saw lettuce. The Monterey area provides 85% of the salad greens that are grown in the U.S. and Canada from April to November. Oakes told us that no place in the world grows lettuce as tasty or in as large a quantity as the Monterey/Salinas area. They farm 12 months of the year, and as soon as one crop is harvested, another goes in.

Artichokes are another major crop, especially right along the coast where it is relatively cool and foggy. The area grows 95% of the artichokes in the U.S. and Canada. Away from the coast, the climate is a bit warmer and a tad drier, which is better for the lettuce crop and many others, such as strawberries, pumpkins, broccoli, cabbage, kale, cauliflower, celery, spinach and wine grapes.

Rows of greenhouses had poinsettias in full bloom. Growers were getting them ready to ship for the Christmas holidays. Other greenhouses held vegetable and flower transplants in pots that will soon make their way to our local nurseries.

The 381,000 acres under cultivation around Monterey grow an amazing array of crops that are valued at close to $4 billion annually. Because the land value of the region is so high, farmers generally grow high value crops such as salad greens, strawberries, nursery plants, organic crops and wine grapes. We were fascinated to learn that wine grapes are not harvested by hand, nor in the daylight. Mechanical harvesters go down the rows of grapes at night, shaking the grapes off the vines while the temperatures are cool.

But most crops are harvested by day, by hand. We watched agriculture workers harvesting fields of broccoli, Romaine lettuce and cauliflower. The workers follow a slowly moving tractor, bending, cutting, tossing, bending, cutting, tossing, bending, cutting, tossing. The produce goes onto a conveyor belt or directly up to workers on a platform, depending on what is being harvested. Workers on the platform wrap the produce with twist-ties and/or plastic packaging, again depending on the crop.

The produce isn’t washed, but is packaged right there in the field. From there, it goes into boxes, which go onto trucks, which haul it to a central refrigerated warehouse in the valley. From the warehouse, it goes by refrigerated trucks to stores, or possibly yet another distribution warehouse before final delivery.

I thought about all the fossil fuel that it takes to operate the many tractor runs through a field, the harvesting tractor, the truck trips, the refrigerated warehouse and refrigeration for the trucks, and vowed to make an even greater effort to grow produce at home.

Oakes told us that Monterey gets no water from the state water system. They rely totally on ground water. But like coastal Orange County, they’re getting saltwater intrusion as the ground water table gets pumped down. They’ve taken an approach similar to our Green Acres program, where sewage is treated to tertiary levels and then pumped back into the ground to keep saltwater from encroaching. They also use the reclaimed water to irrigate some non-food crops.

If you’re in the Monterey area and would like to go on one of these interesting and educational agriculture tours, visit agventuretours.com or call Oakes at (831) 761-8463. I’d go again in a heartbeat.

After a long day of photography, the camera club members gathered every afternoon for wine and cheese. We swapped stories of what areas yielded the most fantastic photos. Most people reported that they got great shots of waves on rocks, lighthouses, Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey, and other iconic subjects.

I guess I march to the beat of a different bassoonist. I mostly photographed agricultural workers, irrigation pipes stacked in orderly piles and the crops themselves. Often the crops were tremendously colorful. I photographed pumpkins in fields, heirloom tomatoes at farm stands, and seafood on ice at Phil’s Fish House in Moss Landing. I even photographed the fancy pastries at the Paris Bakery in Monterey.

This was a deliciously beautiful trip.

People on this trip from Huntington Beach also included Charley and Jean Brac, Gary and Pam Degarimore, Linda Gray, Jane Longfellow, Mick and Judi McNulty, Jim and Annie Parenzan, and Greg and Lambria Soos. Attendees from Fountain Valley included Carole and Paul Cherchain, Louie LaCroix and Mike and Nancy Whitmore.

The photo group meets at 7 p.m. in Fountain Valley at the First United Methodist Church at 18225 Bushard St., generally on the fourth Thursday of every month.

Visit www.psoc.net for more information.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].