From The Fields ®
From the Fields is a firsthand report featuring insights from farmers and ranchers across the Golden State, including members of the California Farm Bureau. If you would like to be a contributor to From the Fields, submit your name, county of membership and contact information to agalert@cfbf.com.
Photo/Courtesy Richard Bianchi
Photo/Paolo Vescia
Richard Bianchi San Benito County vegetable grower
Loren Poncia Marin County rancher
We had good rain, somewhere around half an inch. It was kind of a final slam the door to the season. The season started with rain and ended with rain. It was one of those seasons that you never felt like you got your feet on the ground. From the time it started raining last winter, things never settled in; it was constantly chaotic. Farming in the Salinas area has gotten so intense. We go from harvesting to planting, in some cases in 30 days or less. We scale back when the industry moves production to Yuma. At that time, the pace of the work slows, but we have plenty to do. Normally, you plant two or three days a week, and soon we will plant once a week. In the Salinas area, we’re taking advantage of the break in between the rain and getting ready for the coming season before everybody moves down to Yuma. With the harvest that has just wrapped up, everybody is getting things ready for the 2024 season. A good winter is definitely welcome. Hopefully, we don’t get floods. There’s a certain amount of work to get ready. We are preparing ground, getting planting beds ready and doing some last-minute soil amending. We are starting to plant some of the longer-term crops (such as) parsley, and broccoli will be going in shortly. Lettuce is right around the corner, and celery is not too far off that. We keep our core employees busy through the winter. It’s a lot of equipment repair and maintenance. We plan work for employees based on the weather and divide them into groups. One group works in the field, and if it is raining, they’ll move into the shop and work on equipment and maintenance. As for the vegetable market, it’s been a lackluster season. I don’t think it’s been ex- tremely bad, but it hasn’t been strong. Demand has been very soft.
We just got 2 inches of rain in the North Bay, so things are starting to green up and grow, which is awesome. We’re optimistic for a good grass season and high cattle markets. We’ve had a pretty good year so far, and we’re hopeful that we’ll get rain into the spring. Our most important rains are the first one and our last one. We got 2 inches to get started, so that’s great. Now we just need some good wintertime and spring rain. Last year we had a very tough winter. It rained so much and was so cold that we didn’t get much grass growth until May, and then we had a great May and June. But from December to May, it wasn’t very good. Overall, it’s been a good grass year for us. I produce beef, pork and lamb. I also sell chickens, but I don’t raise the chickens my- self. We’re trying to diversify to have all our proteins covered. Cattle markets are close to an all-time high, which is really good for cattlemen. The pork market is pretty low. The lamb market is pretty flat. We have consistent customers, but they’re not really growing. We do what’s called climate-beneficial wool. We sell our wool to Coyuchi. They make down comforters and bedspreads. We don’t make a lot of money on it, but it pays for our shearing, and we make a little money. We’re different from most other ranchers because we sell most of our product direct to consumers. It’s less of a price issue annually because the price is what we need it to be. But I’m concerned because the consumer can only pay so much for meat, and the price of beef is so high that consumers are going to start switching to pork or chicken. We prefer to eat beef at our house, but some people like chicken. We are starting to see people switch away from beef.
Wayne Bishop Yuba County agritourism operator and farmer
Weather is the most important factor in how well we do, and we had a nice, cool September—cool by September standards—so we had a good, solid year with a small amount of growth from past years. The pumpkin crop was probably the best I ever had. I wish I had a few more customers to buy them all. In early September, I didn’t think I had enough fruit set on the vines, but it was an excellent crop. I always plant a little more than what I think I need because you never know when you’re going to have a problem. When it produces well, then I have extra. At least all my customers had a great selection right until the end. We sell a fair amount (of the unsold pumpkins) for livestock feed. People come in and haul them out. But we have a short window of time to get that done. Then we disk the fields and plant our winter forage crops, which are harvested in the spring for feed for a local dairy. We’re finishing planting now. We don’t like to wait too long after Halloween to get started on that because you can get rain, and it makes it difficult to get those crops planted. We took part of our walnuts out last year. I took the Hartleys out. I just have Chandlers left. It’s not a lot of acreage, but we had a good crop this year. We just hope they’re worth something when all that gets worked out. We haven’t figured out what we will plant (in place of the Hartleys). We might grow more pumpkins. We’ve talked about planting apples as a U-pick crop. We’ll put our winter forage crop there in the meantime. We also grow some corn for silage in the summertime, so we might do that on that ground next summer while we think about it some more.
Photo/Ching Lee
4 Ag Alert November 29, 2023
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