Wednesday, October 3, 2007  Almond Handling  I really do wish I
brought a camera, but today I brought a few students to an
almond orchard and handling factory near Ripon, CA. We spent
about two and a half hours ogling at monstrous, loud machines
designed basically to separate the almonds from rocks and twigs,
then from hulls and shells, and then grade, etc. It dawns on me
only after that all of this was only necessary because the nuts
are shaken violently from the tree with a truck, that grabs them
by the trunk with huge arms and drops them into the dirt. (Each
of us got to shake a tree with the truck, was was serious fun -
earthquake in sensurround) And then another truck needs to rake
them into neat winrows, then another scoop them up, then another
take them away. As all this was happeneing I was envisioning
people actually knocking the almonds down with sticks, cleaning
them on the spot and needing no machinery. Apparently it was
done this way not long ago, on some of the same trees. But then
there wasn't