From the Fields: Ryan Elliot, Sacramento County pear grower, packer and shipper

By Ryan Elliot, Sacramento County pear grower, packer and shipper

We’re past bloom. We’ve been able to see what fruit is going to stick on the trees, and there seem to be plenty sticking. It looks very promising. We’re continuing our fire blight applications and checking sprinklers, getting ready for irrigation season.  

We’re interested in seeing what is going to happen with tariffs. We send about 10% of our fresh-packed fruit to Canada and about 5% to Mexico. Our sales team is planning to go to Canada next month to meet with some of our buyers. We’re also in talks with our Mexican buyers. With Canada, there’s some concern around the boycotts of American products. If Canadian consumers aren’t buying, then our customers there aren’t going to replenish their orders, and then the fruit isn’t moving. It might not seem huge, but it’s been a favorable market for us for years. Hopefully, the tariffs stop some of the canned fruit from China and Europe, and we can focus more on our domestic canned fruit products. 

In terms of technology, we’re focusing more on the packinghouse. Our pears are sorted by hand into three grades: fresh pack, cannery and juice. We have about 180 people in the packinghouse when it’s running at full tilt. We toured several packing facilities in the Pacific Northwest that have optical sorting systems. The pears come down a grading machine, and a series of cameras takes about 20 pictures of an individual pear, a machine rotates the fruit 180 degrees, and pictures are taken of the other side. A computer program keys in on any blemishes. The pears then drop onto a belt and are taken to different parts of the packinghouse. 

Hopefully in the next three years we’ll invest in an optical sorting system. It would allow us to take about 60 hand sorters off the packing lines. We’re blessed to have highly skilled workers, but that quality labor may not always be there, so we want to get in front of it and make sure we can run our packinghouse with fewer people.