Saturday was Santa Barbara County Farm Day. More than 6,000 people attend the event every year to learn how their food is grown.
“When you’re at a grocery store you see all the products out there and you don’t know where they come from, how do they grow it, and you get to come and find out,” said Grace Trujillo, Santa Maria resident.
Bonipak Produce was one of the farms participating in this year's event. They produce lettuce and cabbage among other things.
“People are cutting lettuce and putting it on the belt,” explained Eduardo Marquez, automated technician.
Most of the process is done right on the field from picking to packaging.
“We got an operator that’s making sure the product is lined up and ready to be sealed,” Marquez said.
Even the packaging and sealing of the product is done right on the field.
“If you see a bag like this, Costco, Walmart, Albertsons, for example, these came out of these machines,” Marquez said.
These products are not just sold locally.
“We do keep some of it locally, but we have a high percentage of our clients in the Midwest, East Coast, and a few in Canada,” said David Ayala, harvest manager.
Agriculture contributes to 30,000 jobs in Santa Barbara County, according to Santa Barbara County Farm Day organizers. Bonipak employs around 2,000 workers.
“In the harvesting side, it is heavily reliant on our H-2A program which brings people in from Mexico to bridge the gap between the amount of people that we have locally and the amount of people that we need to cover all of our product,” Ayala said.
There is an important timeline in order to ensure customers are getting the freshest produce. It’s not just from farm to the grocery store that’s important but from the farm to the cooling facility across the street that ensures the freshest product.
“They say that for every hour that the product spends at field temperature, it’s about a day in shelf life,” Ayala said.
There are more than 1,400 farms that can be found in Santa Barbara County.
In 2022, the gross production value for agriculture in Santa Barbara County was nearly $2 million.
