Monorack Ride and Orange Harvest

A few days ago, I went up a mountain with my uncle and harvested a bunch of delicious oranges. I also got a chance to ride a monorack for the first time and that was interesting, so I wanted to share some footages with you.

The oranges I collected are of the Kiyomi variety. To describe the flavor of Kiyomi, I’ll compare it with Unshiu, also known as Satsuma Mandarin in the West, which is the most common variety in Japan. Kiyomi is both bigger and juicier than Unshiu, and has a slight hint of elastic texture like you get in Navel oranges.

We rode a small truck and went up the mountain until a point where the road ends. From there, we rode a vehicle called monorack and went up along the rail for about 500 meters or so. The mountain slopes were sometimes steep, and the monorack requires that you maintain your balance which wasn’t very easy because our vehicle was quite old and the seating part was a little unstable. On top of that, due to technical reasons, the monorack had sudden halts about 10 times each way.

But the views from it were beautiful and the ride going both up and down provided quite a refreshing experience. It’s late April and there are some trees with young leaves in bright green, making a nice contrast with the darker shades around them.

As you can see, the monorack is barely large enough to carry two persons, some containers and tools. Each farmer who grows oranges in mountains, including my uncle, installs the rail and the monorack on their own budget to access high places.

There were loquat trees, also taken care of by him. Loquat, by the way, is Biwa in Japanese and Pipa in Chinese. On this day, I harvested oranges and he covered loquat fruits with paper bags, which prevents birds from eating them.

Once we were up there, I got busy harvesting using two different kinds of choppers - one for removing the citrus from the branch and the other for cutting off the branches that gets in your way of reaching for the fruit. You also need a small hand saw to cut off bigger branches sometimes. I worked for an hour or so, and gathered 4 containers worth of oranges, most of which is Kiyomi but also some Dekopon and Harumi - two other varieties.

My uncle used to sell these oranges to Japan Agricultural Cooperatives like all farmers do. When you do that, you have to make your fruits look great because that’s how customers get attracted at the shop. And that encourages farmers to use pesticides, insecticides and the like so that the fruit’s appearance doesn’t get affected by diseases. I guess producing something is one thing and making the produce commercial is another. Nowadays, though, he wants to be free from the commercial aspect and just wants to grow fruits for family and friends, which means he doesn’t use such chemicals, or at least not much as far as I know. This makes his oranges delicious and safe. It's great.