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2003, 57 pp.
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In 1977 the Regional History Project interviewed Ray L. Travers, a native of
Watsonville, California, and a major figure in Pajaro Valley agriculture, as
part of its series of oral histories documenting local agricultural and ethnic
history.
Travers was born in 1921 into the thriving community of Portuguese immigrants
from the Azores, who began settling in the valley during the 1870s. His paternal
grandparents arrived in Boston about 1875, where they met and married. They
travelled by train across the country and settled in Green Valley in Santa Cruz
County in 1876, where a distant relative lived. They bought some land, planted
an apple orchard, and eventually farmed 200 acres while raising a family of
13 children. Travers’s maternal grandfather was a whaler and his grandmother
a Monterey native.
Travers's recollections begin with a description of his family's early history
in the Pajaro Valley during the 1870s. He gives the details of family farming
practiced by his grandfather’s generation when the whole family worked
side-by-side in the orchards. He discusses the many apple varieties which were
then grown and how they changed over the years according to the dictates of
the market. He also speaks about the Portuguese community’s food, customs,
and festivals in the valley and throughout the state.
Travers’s father was an apple grower, and one of the first farmers in the
valley to grow lettuce in the 1920s. In 1939 he became partners with the Sakata
family and established an apple packing shed. When a fire destroyed the shed
he sold out to Sakata, who continued growing lettuce. After World War II, he
rebuilt the storage plant and farmed 27 separate parcels of land, including
130 acres of apple orchards. Travers describes his father’s farming practices,
and the use of pesticides, which included lead, sulphur and oil sprayed with
hand guns. He also discusses the various ethnic groups who have worked in valley
agriculture during the twentieth century. After Travers’s father and mother
died he continued apple orchard farming, eventually farming 250 acres.
In his narration he describes “old style” apple storage when the fruit
was packed in wooden crates and stored in the shade in redwood groves. This
practice was replaced in the 1930s when orchardists began storing apples in
cold packing sheds. During this period, researchers at UC Davis and elsewhere
attempted to find ways to maintain the quality of the apples in storage over
an extended period. Experiments focused on temperature control and the sealing
of fruit in poly liners. In 1935 several Watsonville growers stored 20,000 boxes
of Newtown Pippins in poly liners at forty degrees but this commercial test
failed to prevent spoilage.
In 1956 Ray Travers was the first apple grower on the West Coast to introduce
controlled atmosphere storage for apples, a technique originally pioneered in
England. This was a sophisticated, scientifically-based development in preserving
apples, which extended their storage life by four to six months beyond what
had been possible in cold storage and eliminated browning and rotting.
The Agricultural Research Department of the Gerber Products Company, purveyor
of baby food, wanted to retain the peak quality of apples during a long period
of processing and was interested in finding a storage method which would achieve
this. The company worked with Travers and in 1956 they stored 18,000 boxes of
Newtown Pippins in a gas-tight room in Travers’s Watsonville cold storage
house. This new technique required having a low temperature in the storage room,
and maintaining a low oxygen and high carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere.
As they experimented with this new kind of commercial storage, they established
the optimum temperatures and gas concentrations of oxygen and carbon dioxide,
which eliminated internal flesh browning, and retained the nutritional value
of the apples over an extended period. Subsequently, this technique has become
standard in the industry.
Travers’s narration also includes his overview of apple farming, the introduction
of dwarf apple tree varieties, and the vicissitudes and economics of farming
in the l970s-the need for substantial capital investment, the high price of
land, and the nature of the highly competitive agricultural market. His views
on the growing suburbanization of the Pajaro Valley are prescient in describing
the real estate trends in California where agricultural lands are at risk, being
bought up for housing developments.