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/Dawn Birch
Ag Alert file photo
James Birch Tulare County farmer
Shaun Crook Tuolumne County forester
We’re way behind in getting our summer vegetables in the ground. The transplants are getting really big. I have squash that wants to get planted. There’s a lot of trans- plants I can’t get in the ground—cucumbers, tomatoes. Things that we planted back in January all drowned in the field. They were lettuces and arugula, different types of greens. In February, after all those rains, we thought we’d be able to get back in the fields and at least replant. We haven’t been able to plant pota- toes yet. We would’ve planted potatoes mid-February, end of February, and they would be up by now. I’m glad I don’t have them in the ground because they would have rotted. I’m still going to farmers markets. I usually go to two a week. We only have enough product to go to one. We’ll stop in two weeks. We won’t go back probably until May. I still have a little in my fields, but I’ll probably have a gap for about a month, and then I’ll start picking out of my high-tunnel houses. I have cherry tomatoes in them, and they’re doing OK. I was able to keep the water off them because they’re covered. I’m not the only farmer that’s experiencing a gap. I’ve talked to other farmers, and they’re just going to be out of product, which isn’t good. That means there’s no income. My wife was talking to a stone fruit farmer, and he isn’t going to have any crop because the bees weren’t flying. I think a lot of the stone fruit and the plums are going to be short this year between the wind, the hail and all the rain. But at the end of the day, it’s a blessing getting all this snow and rain. All I did was complain for the last three or four years about not having any water. Come this sum- mer, we’ll have all the water we can use. Hopefully, it’s going to fill up all the reservoirs, maybe even put some water back into the aquifer.
With the lower-elevation areas that we could work, it’s still too early for any log- ging to take place. Mastication projects or fuel reduction should be starting soon, and we’re just waiting for areas to be dry enough to get equipment in. We still have low-elevation snow, something we haven’t had in recent memory. There are a lot of unknowns that the snow is covering up. Hopefully, in the next couple weeks, people will be able to get out and assess what needs to happen as far as infrastructure to even get to their jobs. With the ground being saturated and the wind that came through, there has been a lot of tree damage, such as oak trees being blown over. Foresters have a lot of damage on conifers, pine, fir and cedar trees. Those trees will die, so they’ve got increased salvage to do because of the wind damage. The boots-on-the-ground activities include winter maintenance and writing pro- posals. A lot of fuel reduction and logging jobs are bidding over the winter. Most entities require a written proposal in addition to your price. They look at your refer- ences, past performance and qualifications. Log prices are still really depressed because there’s still a lot of black wood out there. Even though last year’s fire season wasn’t as bad as the previous couple years, we’re still playing catch-up on the fires from two years ago. Our region has burned tim- ber that burned late last year that will need to get off the landscape to start reforesting. Rain here in the foothills should lead to a great grass crop for our cattle produc- ers, as long as the sun starts to come out and we have warm-enough days to get that grass growth because the ground is just saturated everywhere.
Richard Bianchi San Benito County vegetable grower
It’s been a tough winter with all of the flooding. Everybody’s had some flooding. There’s been thousands of acres that went underwater. We’ve had a fair amount. We have ground that’s too wet to get in to do anything. We’ve had a lot of rain, which is generally good for agriculture and the soil, but it is a problem. It affects everything. Product that is supposed to be planted in the Salinas area is still getting planted down in the desert, which it shouldn’t be. It is going to affect the economy, and it is going to affect the workforce. H-2A workers are getting their contracts extended in the desert because they’re not able to start here in Salinas. For growing vegetables, they’re going to start transitioning from the desert season to the Salinas season in the next few days. It is going to be a slow transition and a long transition. The Salinas season is going to take a while to get started because plantings haven’t been consistent just because of the weather. It is going to mess with planting schedules and ground availability. We’re planting lettuce, spinach, broccoli and cauliflower, all of the summer-season vegetables. For a crop that you would plant three days a week, we’re planting it once a week because that’s the only time we have to get in (to access the fields). After rain slowed down two weeks ago, we started tractors and planted through the week- end. We planted one day last week, and then it rained again. The rain makes everything hard to do, and it’s not ideal. Yields are going to suffer.
Photo/Courtesy Richard Bianchi
4 Ag Alert April 5, 2023
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