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Welcome to the Salinas Valley. We are just a little bit south of Salinas, and we are
taking a side road called Esperanza. And we are going to be heading out and over to do
a little water testing and just kind of get a lay of the land. So, it should be interesting.
We just pulled off the 101, and we are going to take some back roads to San Juan Bautista.
I just thought I would give you a sense of some spinach fields, new spinach fields that
have just been planted, and just, sort of, the size of the operation here. It is just
amazing. It really is pretty intensely farmed.
So here we are at the San Juan Bautista Mission,
and it’s a beautiful little rose garden.
Looking out onto the fields in the distance you can see the workers working in the field out there.
Pretty amazing.
Here we are watching some workers harvest, and you can see the port-a-potties down here.
Those are field crates.
Here we are at Earthbound Farm Organic factory. This place is absolutely huge, and as I drive
out of here I think you’ll get a better sense of now everything, and we’ve got right
across the street are the fields. It is absolutely surrounded in this really lovely valley.
As we get up a little further, you’ll notice right down, or excuse me, upstream of here
is a little cattle farm not too far from here. So we’ll show that to you as we go by.
So we are crossing a water source that runs, actually, parallel to the plant and into those
fields. As we’re driving along, it is quite beautiful. As we come up around this corner,
you can see the water source here on our left, again with more fields and quite a large packing
house out farther in the distance. We’ll turn down there to see whose packing house
that is. But as we come up around this corner, you will see a nice little bunch of cows which
are, again, just slightly upstream from the Earthbound Farms Organic plant.
This is a shot just to give you the idea of the proximity downhill from the cattle to a dry creek bed
which clearly during a rainy season might, obviously, fill with cattle feces and move
down.
So we are now about a mile and a half, maybe a mile and a quarter up the road from the
irrigation area, and you’ll see that there are quite a few cows and we are definitely
upstream and uphill from the fields that we just saw. You can see the number of cattle
here is just amazing. I mean, there are a lot of cows here!
Patti believes that they are feral,
so we’regoing to try to rescue them and bring some home! Do you think we can get a couple of
them in our back seat?
So here is a field being watered that is just slightly downhill and downriver from the cattle
farm that we just saw. You could see one of the pumpheads we just came by.
So, here weare in the Salinas Valley.