A trip to a fruit grower

Yesterday, I was invited to join a group of "Oversea alumni of Taiwan Normal University" to a trip to Ripon to do cherry picking.
In other years, we only went to Brentwood to do cherry picking, never think about go this far almost Modesto to do cherry picking. It turns out that even though Ripon is much farther, but because it's almost right off the freeway 99, it's more convenient to drive to Ripon than Brentwood.
The cherry trees are much better than those we visited in Brentwood, and there are a lot of white cherry together with black cherry. People know that white cherry is more expensive than black cherry in grocery store, so everyone was picking white cherry, seems all those black cherry will be wasted. I wonder whether we can sell it in farmers market to make a little profit.
The most important gain in this trip is we have chance to talk to the farm owner Charles and have an opportunity to understand a farmer's life.
Charles obviously have lived there for a long time. He has a lot of fruit fied. He grow cherry, grapes, almond, water melon and many others. But it's difficult to deal with those retailers. Every year less than 40% of cherry is taken by retailer, all those left over either wasted or picked by people like us.
He talked a lot about how he deals with retailors, it seems a quite difficult business.
Also a big topic is about whether pestcide should be used. Everybody is concern about pestcide, and Charles said he almost doesn't use pestcide at all. But in some year, if there is a lot of bug, he has to use, and he will choose least dangerous one. He mention his neighbor use a lot of pestcide.
Another topic is about labor used to pick up fruit. To reduce cost, Charles has to use new immigrant. So he support American allow "honest", "hardwarking" immigrant. Otherwise, Charles said, cherry will cost $8 per pound in grocery store, and this is actually a fact in some LA cities.
Also Charles looks very old alredy, he need to pass his business to his next generation. That's why his son Michale came back home. But it seems Michael doesn't like this business very much, but I can tell Michael is a very nice young man.
Sitting in his yard, we found another interesting thing. Even though I saw hummingbird feeder in Home Deport, Wal-Mart, and many places in the park, but I never really see hummingbird feed on it. And this time we saw two hummingbird drinking on the feeder. Charles use red color sugar water, and after many test, they finally found hummingbird like red color water better than other colors.
The more interesting story about the hummingbird is, as Michael said, when the sugar water runs out, hummingbird will knock their window glass to ask more, this sounds unbelievable!
This is a interesting trip, and I understand why we should do cherry picking, and the life of a farmer.