I had taken my mom to The Swag, a inn on the edge of the Smoky Mountains and one of the other guests shared this story as we ate our salad at the communal dinner table.
He works for an "oil company" and was in Arizona. One of his contacts (his company starts with a D) asked if he wanted to see how "bagged lettuce" was processed. They piled in a car and drove out to the middle of nowhere with nothing but MILES of greens.
Here's the process: there is no human intervention touching the greens at all, although I'm not sure if the vehicles are robotically driven or not. The fields are robotically plowed and laser-leveled with tracks between the mounded areas. Then, based on the "size" of the bag-o-greens (ie: 5 oz, 10 oz, 1 lb, etc), the appropriate seedling (mixed baby greens, spinach, romaine, etc) are popped into the ground via robotics, watered robotically and then harvested robotically when deemed to be the perfect weight.
At that point, a vehicle moves down the rows, harvesting the greens and lifting them inside the vehicle, which passes them through washing cycles (still inside the vehicle), then the greens are bagged/sealed in the right size bag, then passed off (mechanically) to a packaging vehicle...all still moving along in the field.
By the time it comes off the field, it is not only bagged, but it's already boxed and ready to ship to the stores.
So picture an entire row of baby greens all sized to a precise 5-oz portion getting plucked by a machine. Instead of the greens coming to the conveyor belt, the process has moved out to the fields.
There's dinner.
He works for an "oil company" and was in Arizona. One of his contacts (his company starts with a D) asked if he wanted to see how "bagged lettuce" was processed. They piled in a car and drove out to the middle of nowhere with nothing but MILES of greens.
Here's the process: there is no human intervention touching the greens at all, although I'm not sure if the vehicles are robotically driven or not. The fields are robotically plowed and laser-leveled with tracks between the mounded areas. Then, based on the "size" of the bag-o-greens (ie: 5 oz, 10 oz, 1 lb, etc), the appropriate seedling (mixed baby greens, spinach, romaine, etc) are popped into the ground via robotics, watered robotically and then harvested robotically when deemed to be the perfect weight.
At that point, a vehicle moves down the rows, harvesting the greens and lifting them inside the vehicle, which passes them through washing cycles (still inside the vehicle), then the greens are bagged/sealed in the right size bag, then passed off (mechanically) to a packaging vehicle...all still moving along in the field.
By the time it comes off the field, it is not only bagged, but it's already boxed and ready to ship to the stores.
So picture an entire row of baby greens all sized to a precise 5-oz portion getting plucked by a machine. Instead of the greens coming to the conveyor belt, the process has moved out to the fields.
There's dinner.