When Life Gives You Lemons

               

Hey everyone! It’s Kristy. A couple of years ago on a school field trip, I went to a produce farm/ lemon orchard called Limoneira. They’re mostly known for their lemons, avocados and oranges but they do grow other stuff there too (like PINK lemons!!!!!! Crazy, I know! But no, sadly, they do not make pink lemonade…) In their orchards, they grow their produce sustainably through their water management, green waste recycling and their huge field of solar panels (yay!). We drove around the whole farm in a little old-timey trolley (which I loved) and got to see all of their orchards. After the trolley tour was over, we went inside their factory (and wore these totally awesome hairnets…) and got to see how they sorted the lemons to sell. We got to go up on scaffolds and see a whole range of machines that sorted the lemons, made boxes, put the lemons into boxes and put the stickers on the lemons (my favorite part because I had no idea how they did that!!!).

After raving about my cool tour to all of my friends and family, I finally get to go back and I’m so excited! For our senior project, Jill and I want to look at the process of how our food gets from the farm (or orchard) to our fridges and also at the organic vs. non-organic aspect of farming. When we were discussing what farms/ orchards/ plants we can go and visit, Limoneira immediately popped into my head because of the huge impact it left on me from that field trip. Now, we both get to go and see the farm fully functioning and learn about what it takes to run a produce farm.

Ok, so I kind of went crazy finding some pictures for you guys to see of Limoneira so I hope you enjoy them!


First off, here is Limoneira's website if you want to check it out: http://www.limoneira.com/

This is Limoneira's logo (when we went

 on the tour we  got little goodie bags with a

 bunch of different magnets. Anyways, one of the magnets

 has this picture on it and is also currently on my fridge :) )

Here are the solar panel fields at Limoneira,

 along with some miniature sheep (Our tour guide mentioned

 something about the miniature sheep living in the solar panel

 fields but I forgot why). Just a quick fact for you to

 think about: the solar panels at Limoneira produce

 1/3 of the energy that Limoneira uses!!!

Here is a picture of the actual factory part that

 we toured (the one where we had to wear the 

unfortunate hair nets hahaha)

Here is a picture of inside the factory where the

 lemons are sorted and packaged to be sold.

This is a trolley that looks exactly like the

 one we took to tour the factory. Cute, right?

Also, here is a picture of the pink lemons I

 mentioned earlier if any of you were interested in

 seeing what they looked like.

And last but not least (and on a less related note), my research on Limoneira led me to discover that it is a very popular place to film movies, get married or go in a hot air balloon 
ride!!

~Kristy

No News is Good News?

Wow, can’t believe it’s been over two weeks since our last blog post! Let’s just say that “Finals Week + Tons of Homework + College News ≠ Blog Posts Galore!” But now we’re second semester seniors, so it’ll be more like “Less Homework + Easier Schoolwork + More Free Time = Lots of Blog Posts!” Sounds good to me!

So as we’ve basically already explained, we haven’t really worked on our senior project much recently. Besides writing up and submitting our Final Proposal (cross your fingers that there’s no issues with our senior project so that we can continue working with our farming concept), and contacting Limoneira (who we left a message for about touring their facilities…and have yet to receive a response from) in addition to a dairy processing plant (who is located 6+ hours away by car – I guess we can cross that one off our list) we’ve spent most of our time focusing on non-senior project (but still school related) things!

For now though, the only thing we haven’t updated you on is more about Limoneira, previously mentioned above.  If you’re like me and you like puzzles and/or looking for roots within words (…first my interest in farming, and now my interest in word roots? This blog is making me feel slightly dorky), Limoneira is probably self-explanatory (especially if you take or speak Spanish!), but if you’re not seeing it I’ll help you out: LIMONeira.  Yep, it’s a lemon (limon?...lemon? close enough) farm (orchard? factory? place with a bunch of lemon trees?)…well they also have oranges and avocados, but that’s beside the point. Anyways, I’m going to let Kristy type up a more detailed post about Limoneira for those of you who are curious since she is our “Produce Expert” (since we are doing a group project we had to justify why we needed two people doing it, so we decided that Kristy will focus on produce while I focus more on livestock). She’s also been to the lemon farm before so I guess she’s a “Lemon/Limon Expert” too!


~Jill