Watermelon growers see fruits of labour
Those big, ripe watermelons you’re seeing in grocery stores would likely qualify under the 100-Mile Diet rule. In fact, they probably came from just down the road.
Farmer Pete Gubbels, of Mount Brydges just west of London, has been growing watermelons for about 15 years, after getting out of tobacco.
“I needed something to do after the demise of tobacco, our land was suited for it, we had water and had experience with people (migrant workers), so it was an easy transition to move into watermelons.”
Gubbels belongs to a small group, called The Growers, of four farmers who started selling in Ontario, then added Quebec and now ship to eastern Canada. They’ll soon be shipping to Saskatchewan and Alberta.
But that success took years to accomplish, with Loblaw being the first company “to take a chance on us, and we’ve been partners ever since.” Gubbels said the first contracts were the difference in staying in the business 10 years ago, or moving on to another venture. Now their two biggest contracts are with Loblaw and Costco, who take the majority of their produce. Watermelons by definition need a lot of water, and this summer has been giving an over-abundance of so-called liquid sunshine, especially in the last couple of weeks after a very dry start.
The plants can’t always handle all the water they take up and some melons end up with a condition known as “hollow heart,” and those can’t be sold in stores, Gubbels said.
For 10 years, Mexican migrant worker Cipriano Hernandez has been working with Gubbels, and he knows watermelons as well as anyone. The watermelons are picked in the fields by eight men, strung out in a wide line behind a slowmoving tractor bearing two conveyor belts. The workers walk the fields and pick the ripe watermelons, which then are placed on the conveyor belt. The two belts feed the melons towards the centre, where a third conveyor belt takes the melons and re-directs them up onto a wagon.
This is when Hernandez goes to work.
Each melon coming up the conveyor belt gets a practised thump, a swat with the palm of the hand that tells Hernandez if the fruit is solid or has gone watery with a “hollow heart.”
All day long, from a 6:30 a.m. start until they ’re finished in early evening, Hernandez is the final arbiter of whether the watermelon gets to move on to the consumer, or is left in the field to be crushed by the wagon wheels, or simply left to rot if found imperfect.
The wagonloads of sweet melons are then hauled to the Gubbels farm southwest of Mount Brydges, where a crew of mostly teenagers place them in large cardboard shipping containers, 60 per box, to be transported to local and not-so-local stores.