On some of my fields, water was cut back 25%. Half of my rice acreage was 100% (cut back). I couldn’t grow all my acres of rice because I don’t have enough water. I’m being creative with water, running a well and recirculating every little bit. One field I left completely out. I had to do the preventive planting insurance route on that. The other field we drilled the well, and it’s a struggle. In hindsight I probably should have never done it. To try to keep it covered, the wells just can’t do it because the ditches every- where are dry. You try to make an effort in whatever you can do. You don’t want to put it all under insurance, and you’ve got to make decisions at certain times. Those de- cisions were tough this year to make. I’ve done a lot to get planted what I could. The beans were planted in fields that didn’t require any water now. We pre-irrigated them and planted the dry beans. Those fields take less water, so I could move that over to my rice acres. David Roberti Plumas County rancher and farmer
we can. Our biggest challenge coming in this year is managing feed for cows from pasture because there’s no growth from lack of rain. We’re still OK with irrigation water. We do have several deep wells that we’re pumping from, but our surface-water allocation got cut about 50%, so that hurt things some- what. Our biggest problem is the pasture lands and the lack of any dryland hay ground. We use that hay for our winter feed. We’re going to be really short on that, too. On the positive side of things, hay prices and hay demand are way up because of the lack of production across the West. At least hay prices are up to help offset a lot of the added costs of electrical pumping. We do have a little bit of hemp planted again this year. Like with everybody that tried to grow hemp, it’s not turning out near- ly as well as everybody thought it would. We haven’t completely given up on it, but we’ve scaled back quite a bit. Right after we got planted the first week of June, we had a couple of pretty good windstorms. We lost probably about 30% of what was planted, but we had some extra plants, so we replanted some of that. We use all feminized seed for the hemp. This year we tried some other stuff. We’ve actually got it genetically changed to where if a plant does produce pollen, it will not be able to be received by many of the plants. They’ve got it built into the seed now, so it’s pretty interesting how they’re modifying this stuff to control pollination problems. Finding a market is really tough. A cou- ple of years ago, there was pretty heavy
supply, especially for what’s called the crude-oil process to make the CBD oil. There was so much hemp grown and so much oil produced that one year that shelves were just full of CBD crude oil, so it’s taken a while for that to dry up and for markets to get established. We just had this Beckwourth wildfire, which is right in our backyard. It didn’t damage any of the agriculture too badly, other than a lot of rangeland that was in the mountain areas; it did burn a lot of that up. The entire area of Frenchman Lake, where we get quite a bit of our surface water, was burned. We’re not sure what’s going to hap- pen with that watershed and what kind of environmental impacts will come out of that. It’s been a pretty devastating fire. Jim Spinetta Amador Countywinegrape grower In the Sierra
growers up here. A lot of the water is runoff in this area and it’s just not available, so we don’t have the water this year to water the grapes. We’re keeping whatever grass is there short, dropping the crop on the young vines and thinning it on the older vines. Sometimes we get hotter in the Sierra foothills because it’s inversion. It gets really hot in the day, then it gets really cold at night. That’s why the Italian grapes do good in our region because of the hot days and cold nights versus down in Sonoma. Down in that area, all the French varietals do good because they get that delta breeze that comes in. The good thing is that our grapes are Italian varietals, so they are acclimated for the dry conditions. Plus, we only have drip systems, so it’s very efficient. Over the years we do very few drip water, so the roots are down deep. We do have 7 feet of decomposed granite, so those roots are deep down there. We use St. George root- stock. They’re very drought-tolerant vines. We graft our scion on top of that, whether it’s zinfandel, barbera or muscat. We’re not going to get the quantity, but there’s always something positive in the grape industry. We’re going to get hopeful- ly better quality this year, because a grape only has so much flavor. The more water you add to it, the more you dilute that quality. It should be an exceptional year as far as quality. It’s definitely going to be an early harvest. We’re planning on mid- to early August for harvest this year because the yields are just so low—and the earliest on record.
foothills, it’s dry just like every- where else in the state. We’re only about 40% normal of precipitation. The stress is already showing
Drought is our biggest prob- lem. A lot of our dryland fields and pastures are probably drying up three months early. Where we should have
in our winegrapes—lots of zinfandel, lots of barbera. They’re showing stress now in July like they would end of August, close to harvest. We’re actually already seeing some veraison, which is when they go from green to purple. We see the grapes already turning color just out of stress because it’s so early. There’s no water source for several
pastures until the first of November, they’re just about gone already. We’re selling off some cows to try to stretch things as far as
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July 21, 2021 Ag Alert 5
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