West Coast Produce Expo attendees see avocado farming, packing up close

PALM DESERT, CALIF. — Index Fresh, a global marketer of avocados, recently offered West Coast Produce Expo attendees a chance to tour one of its avocado orchards in Redlands, Calif., and its packing facilities in Bloomington, Calif.

Index Fresh was founded in 1914 as a grower-owned citrus packing facility that transitioned to growing avocados in the 1950s. Today, the grower-owned company focuses entirely on avocados. 

“We work with several growers from San Diego all the way up to Monterey County so we can harvest fruit that is mature for the right time of year to bring the quality and size of fruit that our customers need, so we got a wide range of growers and geography within the state that we can harvest from,” Keith Blanchard, California field manager for Index Fresh, told tour attendees.

Marcum Avocados, the site of the tour visit, is a 10-acre hass avocado orchard with several other varieties interplanted as pollinators. Giuseppe Bonfiglio, a fieldman for Index Fresh, said the company has been working with the Marcum family since the 1970s. The orchard itself originally started in citrus and transitioned in the early 2000s to avocados. 

“Mr. Markham started interplanting hass trees, so he had an orange tree planted and then planted an avocado tree,” Blanchard said. “They were interplanted and it stayed that way for about three years, which allowed them to harvest some oranges to keep a little revenue going into the farm and also start to harvest avocados. As the avocados got big enough to take care of themselves, then they removed the orange trees.”

Blanchard said Redlands was traditionally a citrus-growing region due to the fluctuating temperatures of the growing season. The orchard does use a wind machine to help keep the orchard warm during freeze events and irrigation during the summer to keep the trees and fruit from overheating.

“We're having, I feel, a lot [fewer] cold events,” Blanchard said. “The state still does unfortunately see some pretty severe heat events. We've spent the first 20 years of my career trying to keep an orchard warm. Now it seems like we spend a lot of time on and not having it overheat.”

Marcum Avocados' orchard is planted with 20-by-20 feet distances and yields around 940 bins per acre on about 1,100 trees. Avocado trees can grow about 3-8 feet a year. Canopy management is a main focus for the orchard to keep the fruit in easier-to-reach areas of the tree. Blanchard said this is a deviation from the traditional rainforest-style avocado orchard, which was easier for the industry when water and labor were readily available and inexpensive. 

“Markham Ranch has started to adopt a canopy management and a pruning program that helps mitigate some of the alternate bearing effects of the avocados and allows them to have a greater surface area to set fruit,” Blanchard said. “Instead of it just being at the top of the canopy now we're able to get flowers and fruit all the way down to the orchard floor, essentially.”

While at Marcum Avocados, attendees watched a demonstration of an Afron platform used for both harvesting avocados and pruning. The platform goes up about 25-30 feet and works on level terrain. 

Bonfiglio said the team at Marcum Avocados works with Index Fresh's in-house agronomists to gradually bring the orchard's height down to something more manageable. Trees prior to the canopy management system were more than 40 feet tall, which complicated working with the harvest platform. While many avocado orchards opt to cut down or stump excessive growth, the orchard loses production during that transition time. 

“They're gradually bringing the trees down, and the idea is to do it over three or four or five years,” he said. “Recover and rejuvenate the trees without losing production in any given year.”

Bonfiglio said other notable attributes of the orchard is a good water source and good fertilization program. The orchard is also pesticide-free, he said, and while it's not organic, the orchard management team puts an emphasis on cultural controls and growing practices to produce good fruit.

Index Fresh also took attendees on a brief tour of the company's Bloomington, Calif., packing and cooling facility, which opened in 1989. The company continues to expand within the building, adding more packing lines for its bagged avocados.

Santiago Pacheco, vice president of operations, took attendees inside the building, which was packing avocados during the visit.

The final tour stop was at the iconic Shields Date Garden in Indio, Calif., where the tour group had a chance to try an infamous date shake.