In college they call it “crop science” because there are many measureable and technical factors involved in producing a crop, but when your job involves taking that product from field to fork, it is also an art.

Mark Adamek is harvest director of romaine and mixed leaf for Salinas, CA-based Tanimura & Antle, one of the premier vegetable grower-shippers in the country. “They call us harvest managers,” said Adamek, “but each of us are involved in much more than that. We take the product from seed until they close the reefer doors” as the product is being shipped to a customer.

Mark AdamekIn so doing, Adamek, and the other harvest managers, are responsible for not only producing a marketable crop but estimating accurately how much product will be needed two, three or four months down the road. They need to take into account many different factors including the weather, available land, the water situation and marketing conditions. And in recent years that has meant factoring in the locally grown movement that has caught on across the country.

Adamek said that is a tricky proposition. More than a dozen years ago when he came to T&A, already with a good deal of experience in crop production under his belt, it was a bit easier to project the summer needs of the company’s customers. Today it is more challenging as many of these companies switch to locally grown deals especially during the June-August period. Those deals, however, tend to have inconsistent supplies causing those customers to continue to look west for some of their needs. T&A doesn’t want to get caught with too much product but it also doesn’t want to miss a sales opportunity when the local deals don’t quite meet expectations.

“It’s a challenge,” Adamek said. “It’s a game we have to play every day.”

As he surveyed marketing conditions in late June, he said there was more demand for Western vegetables than has been historically true for this part of the summer. “Things are changing again,” he said. “For the past three years, we have had more [summer] demand for our production than before. We may be experiencing a new normal.”

He said weather conditions, including climate change, may be permanently affecting production for the local deals, meaning more demand for Western vegetables. He added that weather conditions in California this spring and winter have also had an effect on current production numbers. “We had a warmer, dryer winter and that has had an impact.”

Everyone in California is talking about water and the lack of it, but Adamek said that has not been much of a problem in the Salinas Valley. “We are sitting on a great aquifer here so water has not been an issue but it could be” if the drought continues.

Another big part of the harvest director’s job is to find suitable alternative crops. Adamek explained that if you farm the same land with the same crop too many years in a row, yields suffer. “For iceberg or romaine, you can get a good crop a couple of years in a row but by the third and fourth crops you are going to see a decline in yield.”

Consequently, the company is always looking for rotation crops that will both replenish the ground with nutrients and be marketable. Adamek said the cole crops — broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc. — will do the job but market conditions only allow the planting of limited acreage of those crops. “I am always looking for something new that will work. I have a couple of very promising projects but nothing I want to publicize yet,” he said.

Because T&A farms so much of its own land, Adamek said the quest to find good rotation crops is very important and never ending. The firm always has acreage needing a rotation crop on it.

As he surveyed the rest of the summer, Adamek said that it is impossible to predict what market conditions will be because of the many changing factors including weather patterns across the country. Nonetheless, it is his job to make those forecasts on an ongoing basis — and be right most of the time. “I think for romaine [his top responsibility] we are going to have a pretty good market all summer. The market is good right now and I see a slow rate of decline as the home grown deals increase” in July and August. By September, he said the local production will fall off and most buyers will once again focus their full attention on the West Coast to fill their vegetable needs.