Ag Alert March 17, 2021

Theresa Jeffreys Bright ColusaCounty pecan farmer Right now, there’s not a lot

going on in the or- chard: basic stuff like mowing and weed spraying around the trees’ rows. We just had some hedging

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done. We’ve not hedged for the last two years, just because of costs. Last year we had a real low crop, so we feel like we need- ed to shake up the trees a little bit, so we did a little bit of hedging. Now, the next step is using a labor crew to get the sticks out of the orchard. Our first real treatment will be probably first part of May with a zinc spray, once the trees leaf out. Hopefully, we won’t have any aphids by that time. We spray zinc three to five times a year. The first one we always spray zinc, but after that, we just wait to see if we have an aphid infestation so we can spray it on once. Other than that, we’re kind of in a holding pattern, looking forward to a better harvest than last year, hoping and praying like ev- erybody else for rain. The trees are still completely dormant. There has been a little bit of collection of bud wood for future grafting. That’s something that I’ll probably start working on, is grafting some of the rootstocks that have been plant- ed. I’m doing that because I’ve had horrible predation by gophers. They eat the tree off of the roots. It looks so bad—like Swiss cheese when you drive down the rows—be- cause there are so many gopher holes. We’re not sure if it’s all gophers or if it’s a combination of the gophers chewing the tree and then the trees getting crown root gall, which pecans are susceptible to. It could be that the gophers first chew on the roots and damage them enough to where the crown root gall can then invade the tree. Joe Zanger SanBenitoCounty farmer It was just over

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a year ago when I wrote about our late-winter work in preparation for the 2020 crop. Well, a lot has happened since. With several years

of large statewide production, winegrape values fell sharply, with considerable acre- age in San Benito and Santa Clara counties going unharvested. We did pick ours and were fortunate to sell the crop to our winery operation at a price that just covered our cultural and harvest expenses. We retail almost all of our wine and were very concerned about the

4 Ag Alert March 17, 2021