Jerry Maltby ColusaCounty rice farmer and feedlot operator
Organic rice this year is a good price, but the weed problem was as bad as I’ve ever seen it. The yields were way down compared to previous years.
The only saving grace was the price is up. With organic, there’s really nothing you can do other than deep water. Even that didn’t work this year. We’ve been putting up a lot of organic and conventional rice straw for cattle feed. I’ve sold quite a bit of it already and have more to sell. It’s a good market. We only bale what comes through the harvester. It makes it a more-palatable feed for the cattle. Hay prices are really prohibitive for the commer- cial cattlemen. They have to use alternatives just to try to get by. Hopefully, we’ll continue to get some rains to get some feed in the hills, as well as water in the reservoirs. One man’s problem is another man’s salvation. We’re at about 90% capacity right now in our feedlot. We still have room for cattle. Because of the byproducts we feed, we can keep them here until the grass starts in the hills, but it’s going to be a while before that happens. I can actually feed them cheaper than (ranchers) can, simply because we have different byproducts. We can mix the feed, whereas most of the com- mercial cattlemen can’t. The Charolais bull market has been good. We still have more to sell, but the commercial prices of our cattle are still below where they should be. When you have packer con- centration, as we do, they’re controlling the price. Some of those packers are making $800 to $1,000 a head on their carcasses and only owning them for a matter of days, while the feedlot and the commercial cattle- men are getting no benefit from the high beef market in the retail stores. The dichotomy is unbelievable, with some of the highest mar- ket prices we’ve seen in the stores and some of the lowest prices we’ve seen for the cattle. That’s why we need more packing plants. Even the government is putting up money now to have small- and medium-sized plants built, because they can see what happened when they had a fire last year in one of the plants, and you only have a small amount of packing plants. There’s no place else to go to have (cattle) harvested. We need more packing plants in California. The trouble is most of the California cattle don’t stay in California. Harris (Ranch) is still there and doing a wonderful job, but there’s just not enough big feedlots, and the reason there’s no feedlots here is because there’s no pack- ing plants.
REGISTER NOW! Join us in person for a combined event! Annual Meeting and YF&R State Conference 2021
December 4-5 December 5-8
YF&R State Conference Annual Meeting
Hyatt Regency Orange County Details and Registration: bit.ly/3Ad3mFU #farmbureaumakingitpossible
4 Ag Alert November 3, 2021
Powered by FlippingBook