Surprisingly, there’s an awful lot of agriculture in the Yuma area (90% of the lettuce in the US is grown in Yuma in the winter months), and in recent years agri-tourism has become popular. You can take organized tours of farms in the area, or just drive up and check some of them out, like I did. It feels strange to drive through so much green farmland, when so much of Arizona is desert.
The highlight of these agriciltural tours is getting to taste the mighty date shake, a deliciously sweet and creamy conconction that is perfectly cooling in the desert sun. If you go to the Imperial Date Gardens, which is actually in Bard, California, but reachable from Yuma and pretty much straddling the CA/ AZ border, then they do a most perfect date shake in their farm store, and you can also pick up chocolate dipped and almond stuffed dates, as well a bunch of gorgeous specialty date products.
The Medjool gates that are grown there in Arizona are so fantastic that they are even shipped out to the Middle East, as well as all over the rest of the world. The tour offered at Imperial Date Gardens was interesting, and not too long – which was good, because really, how much do you really need to know about dates?