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Cody Vaz explains the mechanics of the automated assembly line as students from Fowler and Marysville toured the Vaz Brothers Warehouse in Lodi on Monday morning as part of the State FFA Leadership Conference held in Sacramento over the weekend.
Cody Vaz explains the mechanics of the automated assembly line as students from Fowler and Marysville toured the Vaz Brothers Warehouse in Lodi on Monday morning as part of the State FFA Leadership Conference held in Sacramento over the weekend.
More than 100 students from high schools throughout California were in Lodi and Galt Monday to get a glimpse of how agricultural businesses in San Joaquin County operate.
The students, from cities such as Marysville, Fowler, Bakersfield and Elsinore, were just a handful of about 7,000 from across the state that have been participating in the 94th State FFA Leadership Conference held in Sacramento over the last four days.
About 30 students from Fowler and Marysville were able to tour the Vaz Brothers Warehouse on South Guild Avenue to see the inner workings of the company’s year-old 40,000-square-foot warehouse.
Cody Vaz, operations manager, took the students through each step of the repackaging process, from unpacking wine bottles from a variety of vintners, to unfolding new packaging boxes, to building palettes, to sorting, wrapping and preparing for transport.
The last stage — sorting, wrapping and preparing, is all done with two state-of-the-art robotic arms, which place the new packages on a particular section of conveyer belt and turn them to fit into the stack of boxes like a vertical puzzle.
Then, a third arm spins rapidly around the stack, wrapping it in cellophane and moving it to the warehouse floor, where the wine is stored in a temperature-controlled area before it is loaded onto freight trucks for distribution.
“It’s kind of cool,” Vaz said of leading the tour. “It’s always nice to be able to help out the community and help out kids, show them what we do. I know when I was a kid I liked going to check out stuff like that. Hopefully they enjoy it.”
In Galt, students from Bakersfield and Elsinore toured the Van Warmerdam dairy, learning its history and the process of milking, feeding and caring for cattle.
The students were shown storage facilities for feed ingredients including hay, oats and corn, as well as the machines used to milk the hundreds of cattle at the McKenzie road dairy.
Students also were shown the dairy’s methane digester, which the Van Warmerdam family partnered with Sacramento Municipal Utilities District and Biogas of Redding to build and maintain.
A methane digester is a device that promotes the decomposition of organics in manure into biogas.
Manure produced by the Van Warmerdam cattle is deposited into the digester, broken down by microbes and converted into biogas, as well as a digested solid.
The digested manure is then deposited into a storage structure, and used for a variety of applications, including renewable electricity and vehicle fuel.
Students also toured Pacific Coast Producers Monday, and over the weekend, 130 students from 150 FFA chapters converged on Lodi High School to participate in a careeer development event that exposed them to various aspects of agriculture.
Areas included farm power, vegetable crop judging, agronomy, ag pest control, cooperative marketing, best informed greenhand, computerized record keeping, and ag mechanics.
Karen Chandler headed the volunteer committee for the FFA convention this year. She said bringing the students to Lodi and Galt was an opportunity to show them the future of the agriculture industry.
“We really wanted them to see first-hand, since they all came to the Sacramento area, we wanted to bring them to San Joaquin County and really let them be exposed to the future,” she said. “They know more than we do, but it’s really cool for them to see it.”
The State FFA Leadership Conference was held virtually the last two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This year is not only a return to holding an in-person event, but according to www.calaged.org, it’s also the first time the conference has been held in Sacramento since 1929.
The conference is an opportunity for students to be exposed to a broad range of agricultural science, business and technology career pathways, while celebrating the accomplishments these future leaders achieved over the past school year.
The California FFA Association is part of a school-based national youth leadership development organization of more than 735,000 student members in 8,817 local FFA chapters across all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy in the afternoon. High 66F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph..
A few clouds. Low 46F. Winds light and variable.
Updated: March 30, 2022 @ 3:23 am
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