February 1 dawned clear and windy, a perfect day for the Colusa Farm Show, just a few miles down the road from our Northern California Equipment Appraisal Office here in Yolo Co. So we set up call forwarding from the office phone and spent the day at “the Granddaddy of Farm Shows,” admiring farm equipment and chatting with dealers, manufacturers, farmers, dairymen, ranchers and other fans of agricultural equipment.
Ag equipment and machinery is one of the equipment appraisal speciality areas I enjoy the most. That works out well since this area of California is one of the largest, most productive and most varied agricultural areas in the country. Deciduous fruits and nuts, field crops, grain and hay crops, pasture, rice, livestock (including dairy & poultry), citrus & other subtropical fruit, truck and berry crops, and vineyards all show up on the the GIC California Ag Map featuring the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys.
I happened to take along a little video camera. Doesn’t everyone have one these days? I hadn’t used it previously, but it seemed like fun to do some interviews while we were strolling from tractors to combines to harvesters to solar panels, milling machines and vintage ag equipment. We talked to a Krone hay baler expert, a very nice fellow from the California Farm Bureau and some folks who use a small fleet of the local favorite Hardy Harvesters to do custom rice harvesting. We also got some footage of Orchard Machinery’s Shock Wave Tree Shaker as well as some antique machinery and equipment.
I hoped to do an interview with Mr. Henry Miller of Valley Truck & Tractor, certainly a celebrity in his own right in the Yuba City/Marysville area, but he had gone to lunch when I swung around for the filming.
We’re putting the videos up on the NorCal Valuation YouTube channel as we get them sorted out and edited up. Right now you can enjoy some information about the locally-manufactured Hardy Harvesters and learn a little bit about the California Farm Bureau while admiring one of the most impressive mustaches at the Farm Show.
Thanks to all the nice folks at the farm show who humored me by starring in one of the NorCal Valuation videos. If you’d like to be interviewed with your agricultural equipment, give me a call or send me a tweet and I’ll do my best to drop by with the camera next time I’m in your neighborhood.
Jack Young
NorCal Valuation
