Nut Factory Starts to Take Shape
So, I don't know how many of you will remember how the business' plot of land looked a few months ago when we started putting up our pine nut processing facility, but if you scroll down a few posts you'll see that this summer it was just a patch of grass with a lot of trash scattered on it.
Then, a few weeks ago we updated you and we had foundations being poured and a metal garage that was being used as a storage facility and a shack for the guard to live in. Well, now I want to show you where we're at now, because it's quite a bit of progress since then:
This picture is a week or two old already, but when we last left you we were just completing this part of the job - the foundation. You can see here a couple of the workers working to put a drainage pipe through the foundation wall.
Next on the agenda was a floor; they poured reinforced concrete about 6 inches deep over the whole thing, making sure to line it up with the proper height to match the foundation and also to leave a slight dip in the middle for drainage when we wash the machines with hoses. As you can see below, a rain proved that they had done a good job leaving a slope to the drainage hole (even though the drain is yet to be installed so the water is just standing).
Next we had our first equipment installed to the site. Ideally, this would have been done after we already had the hangar there, or at least a roof, but we were running behind and nut season was upon us so we got the dryers out and to the site so that when we started buying the nuts we would have a way to dry them!
While we had the crane out there we decided to unload our furnace as well. Which was good, because we had been wondering how we were going to get that massive 1000-pound piece of cast iron out of the back of my coworker's truck!
Our first nut purchase! In the background you can see the initial equipment delivery, in the foreground is about one ton of pine nuts still in their shells.
The dryers weren't set up yet that first day, but the weather was nice and we were worried about spoilage so we decided to set up a tarp and just dry the nuts in the sun. My coworker's wife here illustrates what a ton of pine nuts looks like drying out on the ground:
We placed a single ad on TV, just a text line running across the bottom of the screen, 3 times per day, with our number and "We buy nuts!" It was massively successful, bringing us all the nuts we could handle (and eventually we started turning people away because we couldn't afford to buy any more than 10 tons or so this year).
We built very temporary roofs to shield the dryers and other equipment from the rain, and started drying the nuts. We're only using one of the dryers currently, as our little generator can only run one of them at a time, but it's enough to dry several tons a day and we'll hopefully have all our nuts dried by the middle of next week (plenty of time to make sure they don't mold, we hope).
Nut buying can be an adventure; sometimes the whole village bands together to bring their nuts together in one truck, which means a lot of people milling around the weigh station and confusion as to which sacks of nuts are whose and whether or not we've weighed them already. After a few hours we had a good system set up and it worked well.
These people's livelihoods depend in great measure on these nuts, which might be as much as 25% of their annual income in a good year like this one!
The dryer, now up and running, is capable of drying out about a ton of nuts every 4 hours or so. If, that is, you can keep from eating them all while you wait!
Here's a video of how it all looks, but you'll either need to mute your sound or just ignore the generator running in the background, sorry:
This picture is a week or two old already, but when we last left you we were just completing this part of the job - the foundation. You can see here a couple of the workers working to put a drainage pipe through the foundation wall.
Next on the agenda was a floor; they poured reinforced concrete about 6 inches deep over the whole thing, making sure to line it up with the proper height to match the foundation and also to leave a slight dip in the middle for drainage when we wash the machines with hoses. As you can see below, a rain proved that they had done a good job leaving a slope to the drainage hole (even though the drain is yet to be installed so the water is just standing).
Next we had our first equipment installed to the site. Ideally, this would have been done after we already had the hangar there, or at least a roof, but we were running behind and nut season was upon us so we got the dryers out and to the site so that when we started buying the nuts we would have a way to dry them!
While we had the crane out there we decided to unload our furnace as well. Which was good, because we had been wondering how we were going to get that massive 1000-pound piece of cast iron out of the back of my coworker's truck!
Our first nut purchase! In the background you can see the initial equipment delivery, in the foreground is about one ton of pine nuts still in their shells.
The dryers weren't set up yet that first day, but the weather was nice and we were worried about spoilage so we decided to set up a tarp and just dry the nuts in the sun. My coworker's wife here illustrates what a ton of pine nuts looks like drying out on the ground:
We placed a single ad on TV, just a text line running across the bottom of the screen, 3 times per day, with our number and "We buy nuts!" It was massively successful, bringing us all the nuts we could handle (and eventually we started turning people away because we couldn't afford to buy any more than 10 tons or so this year).
We built very temporary roofs to shield the dryers and other equipment from the rain, and started drying the nuts. We're only using one of the dryers currently, as our little generator can only run one of them at a time, but it's enough to dry several tons a day and we'll hopefully have all our nuts dried by the middle of next week (plenty of time to make sure they don't mold, we hope).
Nut buying can be an adventure; sometimes the whole village bands together to bring their nuts together in one truck, which means a lot of people milling around the weigh station and confusion as to which sacks of nuts are whose and whether or not we've weighed them already. After a few hours we had a good system set up and it worked well.
These people's livelihoods depend in great measure on these nuts, which might be as much as 25% of their annual income in a good year like this one!
The dryer, now up and running, is capable of drying out about a ton of nuts every 4 hours or so. If, that is, you can keep from eating them all while you wait!
Here's a video of how it all looks, but you'll either need to mute your sound or just ignore the generator running in the background, sorry:
And that's about it! Hopefully by next post we'll have an update that includes a hangar-style building going up over top of all of this, so check back soon for that.
Thanks for stopping by, and most of all thanks for keeping us in your thoughts in this busy and stressful time.
