Winter is here, and our team is staying on task: the water is on, sanding has begun, and bog renovation continues!

CEO Bill Haines said earlier this year: “We’ve known that the Early Blacks are our weakest variety and eventually need to be entirely replaced, and decided to become more aggressive about it. By 2022, we’ve targeted 769 acres of Early Blacks to be replaced with hybrid varieties.” He also pointed out some results already taking place at Panama, finished in 2012. “We’ve already had a lot of great fruit after only two growing seasons,” he said. And Panama #6 had a record crop this year.

One of the more involved renovation projects this year is at Turf bog, across the street from our main office. First, we built a new end dam roadside in order to keep water from creeping near the road at harvest time. Our team has also removed a center dam, are moving gates, and will be relocating a pump house, all in order to improve our water management. Remember, the key to this business is where the water is coming from, and where we want it to go! And since the team is there digging already, they’re taking advantage of the opportunity to remove the main line in preparation for upgrading the irrigation system.

GM Fred Torres says: “Bryan [COO Bryan vonHahmann] sat down and calculated how much of the center dam we needed to take out to make the bogs at Turf one bog, and now we’re using that to build the base for the pump house. Relocating the pump house is going to improve efficiency a lot. Building it this way also has the advantage of killing two birds with one stone: since we decided to get rid of the dam in the middle, we can reuse it elsewhere and save ourselves some hauling time.” We are also able to use some of it at the Black Rock renovation, where we will also be enlarging the pump house bases. “The pump houses are going to be be replaced, with new fuel tanks on the outside,” Fred says. “”So they’re going to need more support.”

Another time-saver has been the addition of two more Hydremas: “They are going where other dump trucks can’t, as well as doing it twice as fast,” says Bryan. The Hydremas can carry twice as much, which means our already highly skilled drivers (Rick Zapata, Blondie Cruz-Rodriguez, and Caesar Colon) can get the job done in short order!

When it’s ready for planting, we’ll be using Mullica Queen again, which is one of the new Rutgers varieties (a later variety that gets picked toward the end of the season) and has a very high yield potential. But we’ll be checking back on how the team is progressing before then!