OREGON BERRY REVIEW: FARM TO FACE

Oregon Berry Packing lies seventeen minutes from my front door.

In that time I can travel from tacky suburban developments to acres and acres of farmland stretching every direction.

To put it in a different perspective, Portland is also seventeen minutes from my front door, on a good traffic day.

From concrete jungle to the Oregon bread basket is a short trip.

From oregonberry.com:

Nowhere in the world is the combination of fertile soil and temperate climate more perfect for growing all types of berries than in Northwest Oregon.

Building on this natural advantage, we carefully control our entire process to deliver berries bursting with more flavor, color and appeal than any others.

 

When one of the guys invites you to see where they work, what do you do?

You go. You hit the road.

This is the road of blueberries on both sides going on and on.

 

 

From oregon-berries.com:

 

Oregon ranks number one in the United States in frozen blackberry, Marionberry, and black raspberry production, and is a top 5 producer of frozen red raspberries and boysenberries.   

 

From berries to hops to grapes, from hazel nuts to grass seed, you’ve got to tip your hat to the Willamette Valley dirt.

 

Tualatin, Oregon, lies in its own valley near the head of the Willamette Valley. In the time of the Ice Age floods, about 18,000 years ago, the area was a rich wetland.

The gift those floods left behind was a hearty silt containing loess that was picked up from lands in Eastern Washington in the rush of the flood waters.

The deposited loess supported abundant plant life that supported the megafauna animals that benefitted from this rich land, including Columbian Mammoths, Mastodons, Giant Sloths, Grey Wolves, the first Horses, Bison and others in the Pleistocene Age.

 

Flood waters receded after scouring the edges of the valley added volcanic debris from the eroding Cascades to the murky stew.

After things settled down plants took over.

 

Oregon Berry Plant Power

Most often we get blue berries in a store and think nothing of it.

Or a farm stand on the side of the road has them and we stop.

How do they get there?

It takes stacks of flats.

 

 

A fleet of forklifts.

 

 

And the kind of equipment you might expect to find in a micro-chip producing clean room.

 

 

And more.

 

 

The inside tour started at a six man hand washing station where you roll up your sleeves and stick your hands into two separate auto washers.

After that comes the hair and beard nets to complete the feel of an operating room, clean room, or berry processing warehouses.

 

 

Each warehouse has an array of solar panels on the roof.

The whole operation feels so high tech and well planned.

Different varieties of blueberries ripen at different times to keep a supply rolling in.

One blueberry is different than another? Now we know.

The next time you open a plastic clam-shell container and pop a blueberry into your mouth you’ll have an idea of its journey.

Better yet, head out to a U-Pick for some black raspberries right off the vine.

What’s better than farm to face?