August is a busy time of year at the Carcajou Fruit Company as the Carlson family and their workers harvest and pack this year’s cherry crop, which will be shipped around the world.
The farm is owned by Keith and Jan Carlson. Theirs is a family operation. Their daughter Claire Tamang and her husband, as well as her sister Erin Carlson all hold positions in the company.
“Carcajou means wolverine in French. A wolverine is known for being a glutton, so the idea is that our cherries are just so good, that you would glut yourself on them,” explained Tamang. “It’s also the name of a beautiful valley in the Northwest Territories where my parents use to live before they moved here and bought the farm.”
Late variety cherries are the main crop grown on the farm, including Lapin, Sweetheart, Staccato and Sentennial.
“These are the S varieties of cherries that were developed at the Summerland Research Station,” Tamang said.
“They are all later varieties and that’s good for us because the later you can push the season the more money there is in the market.”
It was often the case in the past that cherry crops would be ruined due to summer rainfall.
“We tend to harvest all through August with these split resistant varieties of cherries. Generally in the Okanagan it doesn’t rain as much in August as it does in June or July,” Tamang explained.
The fruit is picked, sorted and packed right on the farm.
The Carlsons have workers return year after year. Many of them are university students and some are local high school students. They have cabins and washroom facilities complete with showers, on site.
They provide lockers for each worker. There is a kitchen and each person is given dishes. Some food is also provided such as oatmeal, rice, tea, coffee and a daily soup. A fleet of reconditioned bicycles stands ready for the workers to use to cycle into town.
“We do what we can to attract a loyal, hardworking workforce and to keep them happy. This seems to do the trick,” Tamang said.
Each picker has their own number and they tag their own lugs, which are the containers the fruit is collected in. The lugs are transported to the packing plant and weighed and scanned into the computer. Each picker is paid by the pound and receives a bonus if they stay until the end of the harvest.
The barcode on each lug also provides a way to trace the fruit from field to market. This computer program was designed by Carlson himself and is called Smart Hort.
After the cherries are weighed and scanned they are dumped into the stem separator. The cherries are pulled apart by centrifugal force so there is one cherry, one stem.
The next step is the hydro cooler, where the cherries travel through cold water which cools them to the required temperature.
They then go through a MAF Optical Sizer and Defect Sorter.
“What this machine does, is it takes a picture of each individual cherry. It determines two things,” said Tamang, “if it is a good cherry or a bad cherry and what size it is.”
Once sorted the good cherries are packed into boxes and then placed on rollers and taken up to the Inventory room which is kept at a temperature just above freezing.
The boxes are then placed on pallets ready for export to international markets in Belgium, Spain, England and Hong Kong. Some fruit is also sold locally.
Tamang explained how crucial it is to keep the cherries cold through the whole process. They leave the farm on refrigerated trucks and are shipped in refrigerated containers.
If the cold chain is not broken the cherries will last five to six weeks.
The farm processes 10 tonnes of cherries per day and the hope is to have 310 tonnes this season.
“Presuming there are no big rain storms between now and the end of August we’re going to have a beautiful huge crop, probably the biggest we’ve ever had,” concluded Tamang.
Have you glutted yourself on cherries this season? If not there is still time to enjoy some, from any number of local growers.
If you know a positive story about someone in our community, contact Carla McLeod at carlamcleod@shaw.ca or contact the Summerland Review newsroom at 250-494-5406.
