From the Fields ®
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Dick Peixoto Santa Cruz County organic vegetable farmer
Billie Roney Tehama County rancher
We get two crops per year up here. As crops are coming out, we’re preparing the ground for the next planting. We have about 40 different crops, and we have 27 different crews out there harvesting every day. There’s a serious farm labor shortage. Having enough people every day to do the harvesting is a big issue for us. Like when we came in Monday morning, we were short 57 workers because they didn’t show up for work. That happens pretty much every Monday. It’s hard to get all the harvesting done when you’re short 57 people that were going to harvest for eight hours a day. We had a flood last year in this area, and a lot of the diseases that were in limited fields got spread over the whole valley. The water took the diseases from one field to the next. Now we’ve got diseases where we didn’t have them. Some of the ground that we thought was clean is not so clean. We had more root diseases that we haven’t had in the past. So far, we’ve lost probably 50% of our napa cabbage to diseases. Rotation is the only tool we have for organic. We don’t put the same crop back on the contaminated ground. Depending on the crop, we usually give it three to five years of rotation. We also trade ground with strawberry growers. If we have a disease that affects vegetables, they’ll come and plant strawberries on our ranch because the disease we have doesn’t affect their crop, and we’ll plant on their ground because the diseases they have on strawberries don’t affect our vegetables. We work with a lot of the vegetable and berry growers to exchange the ground so we can help clean up each other’s grounds. We’ve been doing this for years. When we became organic and didn’t have the fumigants to control diseases, crop rotation became more important, and rotating vegetables with fruit is an excellent way to get the ground clean.
We’ve sent some of the cattle to the mountains, and we’re going to send the rest of them up next weekend. We’re keeping 100 baby pairs down here and feeding them because they’re too easy prey for the wolves. I don’t want to send those little guys up there to be eaten. We have weaned calves younger and earlier than ever before to try to minimize the damage done by the wolves. The higher prices that we’re looking at this year have made that an OK choice. Before, it didn’t feel very smart because you’d keep them down here and you’d have to feed them because everything’s dried up now. Down here, we have to supplement their feed quite a bit. But the calves bring so much money that we’re not going backwards on them. We had really good feed, but it dried up early—sooner than we thought. We had all that great moisture, but then the heat and the north winds came. The feed that’s out there now is very dry, so we’re supplementing. Hay prices have come down. Of course, our other costs have skyrocketed. We’re not using one allotment in the mountains of Lassen County because it was too far from our home headquarters to be able to watch over the cattle properly. We rebuilt the corrals so we could put the entire herd into those corrals at night to protect them from the wolves. It’s really hard on the cattle when you confine them in a small space like that. There’s no water going through there, and it gets real dusty because they kick everything up. Then you start having problems, especially your calves. If you have a lot of cattle in one space, you are not going to have any grass on the ground. We’ve also used fladry, and it’s really ineffective. I think the wolves are so smart no matter what you do. They figure it out after a while.
Tom Gotelli San Joaquin County cherry grower, packer and shipper
The crop was extremely light, unlike last year, when there was just an overabundance of cherries. Pretty much all the varieties were affected. I think the warm temperatures in December and January affected the trees’ dormancy. Last year’s big crop could also be a factor for the light crop because cherries are somewhat alternate bearing. Fruit quality was good. Typically, when you have a smaller crop, you have bigger fruit. It’s always a challenge to get the cherries picked, but it was a different ball game this year just because there was not a lot of fruit. That’s been a major issue related to farming cherries this year. It seems like there’s always something, but that was a whopper. Labor was plentiful in the orchards and the packing shed. Unfortunately, we were not able to pick several of our ranches. There were just no cherries. For example, we did not pick one cherry in one of the ranches south of the Arvin area. People that do have cherries, people that were able to pick probably had a good year because it’s simple supply and demand. Since we have a smaller crop, we’re charging more. At the farmer’s market, our price went up just because the cost of doing business has gone up tremendously. The cost of everything has gone up, so we have to pass that along. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in this business. I think people knew because they go, “Oh wow, I’ve heard you had a really bad year.” Our cherries go all over the world, and we exported a decent amount, although the U.S. has been a real- ly good market for us because Americans love cherries. A greater share of our cherries went to the domes- tic market this year. But because of the light crop, no one got what they wanted. Everybody wanted more.
4 Ag Alert June 18, 2025
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