Bryan Van Groningen, Vice-President of Crops and Soils at Van Groningen & Sons Incorporated, shared insight into the company’s watermelon production this year. Typically planted in March, the cool, wet spring delayed planting by two to three weeks. “We were unable to plant a lot of our early season fields on time this year due to the wet soil and not being able to work the ground,” Van Groningen said.
The troublesome beginnings were redeemed come harvest season in late June, which is “now on par with 2021 and 2022 seasons, which were somewhat normal years,” he said. At the same time last year, yields were about 50 percent of this year’s harvest volume.
As a consequence of the recent heat waves, multiple fields experienced a rapid maturation of fruit. In Van Groningen’s case, “we have multiple field sites that we harvest during a certain time period, and we will go through those fields about once a week and it seemed like that really wasn’t soon enough in some of the fields,” he said.
Some of the crop became overripe and watermelon plants began to shut down during high temperatures. “We had a few quality issues during those real hot temperatures, but once we got out of those hot temperatures, quality’s been excellent,” said Van Groningen.
With regards to labor, Van Groningen said that one of the reasons for the success of the company’s watermelon production is that they experience a 90 percent retention rate of skilled crew members who cut and harvest the melons each year.
“They look forward to coming back every year just because we usually have fairly high-yielding, good-quality fields, there’s a lot of consistency there,” he said. “Everything is done by hand. There’s very little part of the process that’s mechanized,” with the exception of conveyors.
Every melon needs to be individually cut, individually put on the conveyor, offloaded into trailers, is individually sorted, and packed at the packing shed. Watermelon production, though labor intensive, is made worthwhile by having a good process and high-yielding fields, Van Groningen said.
Contributing Author:
Lauren McEwen
AgNet West Intern