Ag Alert July 7, 2021

almost as fast as mills gather materials and up their production and up their facilities. It’s just been a wild and crazy ride. Our industry tends to go through these cycles periodically. Having experienced that a couple of times in my career—more than I like—you just make adjustments. The people that could make them quicker usually come out OK. Sometimes there’s fallout. The American consumer has also been seeing spiked lumber prices, and people are finally pushing back a little bit and not paying the price, so we’re seeing demand fall off a little bit. But I expect it to even out. From strictly the Mendocino County or North Coast perspective, there’s a lot of fire salvage material moving around. Mills are trying to take in what they can while at the same time watching these lumber markets. There’s tentative buying going on. In the redwood area, you’ve got material mainly from the big Santa Cruz fire that is starting to reach mills up in Mendocino and Sonoma counties. The mill in Santa Cruz cannot absorb all of the burn salvage that there is down here. There’s only one sawmill south of San Francisco—the Big Creek mill in Santa Cruz County. It just doesn’t have the capacity to absorb all of the material that landowners are trying to remove from their properties right now. That’s going to be an ongoing issue for at least another year. I think the folks at Big Creek, just like the rest of us, are trying to make decisions in a wildly fluctuating, broader market. I haven’t talked to them in quite a while, so I don’t know if they’re putting on two shifts, in- creasing the output of their mill or if they’re

just trying to hold steady with what they normally do down here. I live in Santa Cruz but work for Mendocino Redwood Co. and Humboldt Redwood Co., so I get the double whammy in terms of perspective. Jackson State Forest in Mendocino County is the largest of all the state demon- stration forests. They’ve got another con- troversial sale with people blocking gates. There’s quite a bit of turmoil right now sur- rounding that. I don’t know if these people are just going to be activist-challengers out in the woods or what will come of this whole controversial timber sale. If these people that are challenging the state with on-the-ground actions have any success in stopping the timber sales of the forest, that will have a significant impact on lumber sup- ply in the Mendocino-Sonoma area. It has upset some of the plans of the loggers that were contracted to do these sales. Their log flow has been interrupted and that’s a direct pocketbook hit for them. Henry Giacomini ShastaCounty rancher Things are

utilize them as long as we can through the summer. In the meantime, the irrigated pas- tures are holding up well, but we’re trying to stock them pretty lightly or destock them by midsummer, so that we can grow as much feed for the cattle coming off the range, be- cause we assume they will come off early. We’re bringing in almost no outside pas- tured cattle, which has been a significant part of our business. You can feel the impacts of the drought as the summer begins. It’s hotter and it’s drier. I haven’t seen our soil moisture this low. The plan is to survive, not put our head in the sand and hope for the best, but try to make some strategic moves, which is what we’ve been doing since early spring. Everything is in a hang-on mode. We don’t want to overreact, but we don’t want to be in a position of not acting soon enough, either. John Perry SacramentoCounty farmer We’re harvest-

the prior year, we probably did average or a little below average. On ground that didn’t have irrigated crops the prior year, we’re definitely below average on the yields. The quality is good. The bushel weight is good, and the protein is good. The only negative side is the yields are down. Typically in our area, we don’t irrigate safflower at all, but this year, because of the lack of rain, we pre-irrigated all our safflower grounds. It looks good. We’re just a little later than we normally would be because we pre-irrigated. Hopefully, we don’t get 108-degree temperatures while it’s pollinating. We look to harvest our safflower probably the end of August, first week of September. The oats we cut for feed, forage. The oats are not irrigated, and our crop is may- be a third of normal because without the winter rains, we just didn’t have the growth on the oats. On the rice, our timing is pretty well where we want to be. The only thing we dealt with there as far as the planting time is we had tremendous north winds, which we had to work around. Weed control looks good. We’ll probably be harvesting the mid- dle of October. The water district curtailed 25% of the water, so we had to cut back our rice acreage 25%, but we’re right on sched- ule and it looks pretty good. Like other com- modities, the price of rice has come up. It was a tough year. It all revolved around the shortage of water. The only offsetting benefit is that commodity prices are up, so the price we’re getting for the commodity is substantially better than last year.

ing our wheat. We’re probably about 80% completed. The wheat was like everything else: It was 1977 all over again, shortage of

going fairly well considering the drought, which is on everybody’s

mind. It’s going to be a pretty tough year dealing with it, but we’re trying to work through it. We’re destocking. We’re just running less cattle. The ranges are pretty dry, so we’re hauling water, trying to

water. We were irrigating our winter wheat in February and March. We irrigated once, probably should have irrigated it a second time. We just didn’t get the rains we needed, so it required the irrigation. As far as the yields, on grounds that had irrigated crops

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