HANFORD, CA -- Warmerdam Packing LLC, here, a fruit grower and packer whose products are marketed by Trinity Fruit Sales Co. in Fresno, CA, has for many years been involved in implementing innovative practices and technologies in its farming, packing and cooling operations that are designed to improve sustainability.

The most recent major project in the family-owned business's efforts to enhance the sustainability of its operations is an $8 million investment in solar panels, which occupy most of the roof area of the packing and cooling facility and which generate enough power to meet 75 percent of the facility's electricity requirements.

According to General Manager John Warmerdam, his father, Bill Warmerdam, who is the company's founder and president, "started getting interested [in the solar power concept] about 18 months ago ... saying this is something we need to do. I was pretty skeptical, because they are quite costly, and the payback is really long-term. You don't reap the [economic] benefits for many, many years."

But "my dad has always had an eye for the future," Mr. Warmerdam continued. "He is very forward thinking. He knows that when that investment is paid off, we will reap tremendous benefits."

Actually, the investment would never pay off were it not for "some financial incentives in place by the government," he continued.

At current electricity rates, the panels will produce about $250,000 worth of electricity, he said, which represents "basically 3.5 percent of the value of the panels per year, so if you have to borrow money at 5 percent, and you are only getting a 3.5 percent gross return, it just doesn't pencil out." Without "assistance from government ... it would be just impossible to do at this scale," he said.

The subsidy covers "a little more than half the cost" of the $8 million project, he said.

With that subsidy taken into account, Mr. Warmerdam projects a payback period of between nine and 14 years, "depending on how quickly energy costs escalate." The more rapidly energy rates rise, the sooner the payback.

The solar installation is just "the latest in a series of innovations that my dad has come up with over the years to conserve energy," Mr. Warmerdam said. "For instance, our packing facility is located on our largest ranch, and we routinely have to pump well water to irrigate the trees, so we use that well water to do some of the cooling of the fruit prior to using refrigerated water. Basically, we take well water out of the ground at about 65 degrees. The fruit is coming in anywhere from say 80 to 100 degrees. So we can get our fruit temperature down to about 70 before it goes into refrigeration," thus reducing the amount of energy needed to refrigerate the fruit.

The well water used to precool the fruit is then pumped out to the field and used for irrigation.

Another innovative energy-saving practice at Warmerdam is the recycling of waste heat generated by refrigeration to heat preconditioning rooms. As a result, "we don't have to utilize any energy to heat our rooms. We already have it available in the form of the heat that is created from the normal refrigeration process," he said.

In farming operations as well, Warmerdam employs numerous practices to improve sustainability.

"Some things we have been doing for quite a long time, and now "plenty of other people" are doing them as well, Mr. Warmerdam said. Those practices have "basically become the standard in the industry." Among them are various integrated pest management techniques.

Warmerdam also uses composting, cover cropping, minimum tillage or no- tillage, mulching and various other practices to build healthy, living soils rather than depend heavily on synthetic fertilizers, Mr. Warmerdam said. "We are quite sparse in our use of synthetics."

One of the main driving forces behind those practices is "simply to get the best-quality fruit that we can," he said.