5-Way Split

Avanti Nut Company is very much a family business, and 10 days ago its patriarch passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. Andy Solari leaves behind a legacy of 6 children and 12 grandchildren, as well as successful farming and walnut processing operations. The funeral in Linden on Wednesday was SRO and then some. There must have been nearly 1,000 people there.

In 2007 I started working at Avanti during the walnut harvest to give me something to do in retirement other than ride my bike and bother Stoker. For 6 weeks during September and October I spend more waking hours in the scale house than I do at home. Before this I really didn’t know Andy other than by reputation as a big farm operator. But over the next 14 years I became well acquainted with him and his 6 adult children. 4 of them are involved in farming with J & A Solari or with Avanti, or both.

My job at Avanti is mostly clerical, with spreadsheets and databases. I’m also a weighmaster, a high sounding term that just means I push a few buttons that control a scale to weigh trucks full and empty to determine the net pay weight. I don’t have the skills that the Solari children all seem to have been born with to drive forklift or a yard goat with a set of double trailers onto and off of scales and unloading elevators. But despite my shortcomings in the forklift department Andy always treated me as an important and valued part of the Avanti team.

Andy was a constant motion machine, as are his offspring. They are go-go-go types, who don’t always want to slow down to carefully keep track of the paperwork. That is my job, and if I do say so myself I am pretty good at it. Order, system, and organization are what I bring to the deliveries from multiple growers and multiple ranches and multiple dryers, all of whom get paid by the weight on the scale. Excel does the work but I have to tell it what to do.

Occasionally Andy would come into the scalehouse with a question about how many deliveries came from a certain ranch and how that compared to last year. Or he might want to know what the quality grades were for a certain field. With a few clicks I was able to provide the answer, which impressed him. I can’t drive a forklift but I know my way around a pivot table!

My favorite Andy story involves split loads. Most walnut deliveries come in sets of double trailers that weigh around 24 tons net. But there are some small lots, or small lots left over from bigger fields that are put in small bins of up to 1200 lbs. and delivered on a trailer. Andy would bring them to the Avanti scale and we would start the split load procedure.

It takes me just as much time to do the receiving process for a single 1,000 lb. bin as it does for a 48,000 lb. load. A 2-way split means there are two separate lots to deal with. A 3- way split is 50% more work than the 2- way. So a 5-way split is a time consuming process. But during walnut receiving season time can be in short supply.

Andy is calm but in a hurry, not surprisingly considering the scale of his harvesting and drying operations during the walnut harvest. The scale is tied up while each small lot is put on the scale, weighed, then taken off. I have to get the bin labels printed and stuck on the bins, which means I have to put the delivery information into the computer database to print the labels. I have to keep the receiving papers from the dryer together with the correct weight certificate and draw and label the grade samples. All this takes time. Nina is usually driving the yard goat with a set of doubles poised to weigh in or weigh out and looking impatient since the scale is tied up and she is forced to sit idle, which is not to her taste at all. I try to work as quickly as I can. By the time the 5 way split is done with and both Nina and Andy are on their way, I am one frazzled weighmaster.

Now that Andy is gone, I know there will be more 5-way splits to deal with, but it won’t be the same. I’ll miss his smile and his handshakes and his laughter. I don’t think I ever saw him in a bad mood, even when his weighmaster got flustered trying to get things done at ‘Solari Speed’. Avanti means ‘forward’ or ‘ahead’. An appropriate word for Andy’s memory.