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After a long winter, spring rolls around on the farm and everything moves into fast-forward. This story should really be titled “Spring on the Farm,” because I’ve been taking pictures and video since April.
If you’re new to Old Mission Gazette, each year I follow what’s going on with the OMP farms owned and run by my family – my brother and his wife, Ward and Carol Johnson, my other brother and his wife, Dean and Laura Johnson, and my nephew and his wife, Nic and Mikayla Johnson. (Read Nic’s notes about the farms’ integrated pest management here.)
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Some of these farms are the same ones I worked on as a kid. I’ll dig out some of those photos and post them here on the Gazette. Here’s one…
After a winter of trimming trees, dealing with paperwork, catching up on necessary certifications (working with chemicals, etc.) and fixing and maintaining machinery, they are now swamped with spring happenings!
Planting, fertilizing, securing new fruit boxes, getting the bee hives out, prepping machinery for cherry season, and spraying are just a few of the spring tasks they’ve been doing.
New on the farm this year is a drone sprayer — yes, that’s right. They’re testing out a drone sprayer to see if it’s a viable option for distributing fungicides and other chemicals. What’s more, the drone sprayer is run by none other than our former UPS Guy on the Old Mission Peninsula. After retiring from UPS last year, Kent Ackerman went into the drone business with Airway Ag.
While my brothers still use traditional sprayers because they’ve got a lot of ground to cover, some of the benefits of using a drone includes better precision (including the hard-to-reach tops of trees) which means less waste, the ability to reach hard-to-access terrain, lower labor and fuel costs, and custom plans for each farmer. The drone will actually sense if there are no trees in a certain spot and stop spraying.
Scroll down to watch a video of the drone, and check out some photos of spring happenings on the farm. Because of the cold spring, they’re running about a week behind on the start of cherry season. As per usual, some blooms were frozen out, but they will hopefully still have plenty to harvest.
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SUPPORT YOUR INDEPENDENT LOCAL NEWSPAPER: I started Old Mission Gazette in 2015 because I felt a calling to provide the Old Mission Peninsula community with local news. After decades of writing for newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Family Circle and Ladies' Home Journal, I really just wanted to write about my own community where I grew up on a cherry farm and raised my own family. So I started my own newspaper.
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Hi Jane. That’s one big drone! Interesting use for it and seems to make sense. How often does it need to “refuel” the pesticides? Janis
I think Ward said it holds 10 gallons, so I’m thinking it has to be re-filled somewhat often. It’s definitely a little surrel watching that big drone take off and land and spray trees!