January 13, 1967 If you ask the Bates family of Valley Center what they do for a living they’ll reply that they run a nut farm. They’ve had to endure jokes about this since 1921 when Grandpa Gilbert Bates bought 200 acres in the valley north of Escondido. The farm has turned into quite a North County tourist attraction. Gilbert's grandsons---Bob and Walter Bates have taken over the operations and they've got a bustling little sales room going. These days, their time is devoted less to farming and more to the processing and selling end of the business. The main product is walnuts---120 tons of them per year. Half of them are grown in San Diego County-- the rest imported from Northern California. Family members and 5 or 6 employees help out in the processing. Better quality walnuts are sold at retail with the lesser grades going to bakeries. Much of the equipment in the plant is homemade. One of the bigger machines---this device for shelling the walnuts. It's a noisy operation, taking in tons of walnuts at a time---cracking them and then separating the shells from the meat. Even the shells have a use--some farmers like them for fertilizer. The Bates Brothers import and roast many other varieties of nuts.... Walter here with a load of cashews from Africa. The farm does all its own packaging. Bob Bates is one of many who runs the home-made machine. The nuts are placed in one pound plastic bags after being automatically regulated to the right weight. Bates Brothers also sells various kinds of dried fruit, which don’t lend themselves to automatic packaging and have to be bagged by hand. So there—in a nutshell you have the story of the Bates family and their thriving Valley Center Farm.