Medjool Date Palms and Yuma Agriculture

 Our outing included a stop in Bard at the medjool date farm for a delicious date shake and a browse through their store.  Medjool dates are the largest and most sought after date as they are sweet and fairly dry.
Watched the "cherry picker" raise the workers to the palm flowers for pollination manually, a very time consuming process.  Many date farmers do not plant male date palms as their only purpose is to pollinate, but rather purchase the pollen and plant many more female date producers.  Pictures this small do not do justice to the flowers; flowers are white to yellowish green and are bundled or tied together and the workers, then hand pollinate the flowers.  Some date farms use rope ladders upon which the workers would need to climb the tree, then climb a permanently installed rope ladder to the top in order to pollinate the blooms.

 I believe the cherry picker is a much safer and hands free method of pollinating.  Very labour intensive, no matter!

the yellow-green bundles are the flowers

On our back, we found workers picking, cleaning, bundling and bagging cilantro in the field, quite an operation! All of this is done in the field, crated and then placed on the truck for delivery to a warehouse for distribution to supermarkets.  It appeared that the bus was preparing to pickup the workers at day's end; equipment would remain in the field until the next day.
This is a field of red lettuce that is nearly ready for harvest.  Wherever there is water, plants grow!  Irrigation canals bring water to the fields from the nearby Colorado R.  Crops grow and can be harvested quickly here.