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On February 14-16, 2023, I attended the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California. This was my second year attending, so it was a little less overwhelming, but still daunting. I definitely smashed my daily steps each day! It is very difficult to explain the sheer size of the event, so I'll impress upon you some of the numbers instead...
- 108,233 people attended.
- Attendees represented 49 states, the District of Columbia, and 56 countries.
- 1,225 companies displayed cutting-edge agriculture equipment, technology and cool new ways of employing technology.
- There was 2.6 million sq. ft. of exhibitor space (241,547 m2). That is more than 30 football fields!
I was super excited for Day 2, where the field day included a tour of the new Wonderful Citrus dedicated packhouse for Halos Mandarins. The operation was very impressive and, again, the numbers do the "talking":
- The packhouse measures in at 640,000 sq. ft. (59,457 m2), which is the equivalent of 11 football fields.
- The packhouse runs 20 hours a day, 6 days a week, in season.
- It has the capacity to process 4,000 bins of fruit a day.
- The 8 dedicated pack lines can produce up to 500,000 bags of mandarins a day.
- They can store up to 31 million lbs (14.1 million kgs) in cold storage.
- The Tomra Compac presort line (which was finished for the day) is 310 ft (95 m), making it the longest electronic sizer and grader in the world, with more than 5 miles (8 km) of chain.
After the Wonderful Citrus tour, we toured a cattle feed plant. Although it wasn’t as relevant to our industry, the scale was immense and there was one very "dominant" addition that stood out. They had recently installed 2 enormous silos, which hold raw corn sourced from the Midwest of the USA - each silo holds 20,000 tons of raw corn. That is 40,000,000 lbs (18,143,695 kgs). They were HUGE!!
I don’t have any official numbers, but a *LOT* of meat was consumed over the 3 days by hungry attendees. The rib eye sandwich and pulled pork sandwich were the clear favourites!
All in all, it was a great experience again, getting to see the trends in the ag/hort industry and what farmers care about all in one giant place, over three (exhausting!) days!
Cheers,
Julie