From the Fields ®
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Paul Vermeulen Stanislaus County almond grower and huller
Brooke Hazen Sonoma County apple and olive farmer
Almond harvest is 10 to 15 days earlier than last year. We’re about a quar- ter of the way through harvest, which will probably be over the first week of October. There has been some movement in the price in the upward direction. I know all almond farmers are hoping it continues in that trajectory. The crop is lighter than people had hoped, but not lighter than they had expected. I’m seeing great quality in well-maintained fields and some navel or- angeworm in some older fields. But overall, the crop is a lot better quality than last year in the early almonds. Last year was a difficult year for (orchard) sanitation because the rain started at the end of December and didn’t stop until mid- to late March. The (lower) worm pressure (this year) is probably due to increased attention to sanitation but also better timing and weather that doesn’t lend itself to growing navel orangeworm. The dust mite pressure this year has been the worst I’ve seen since I was a kid. It is everywhere. Even people that sprayed the expensive materials are having lots of mite pressure. I haven’t talked to anyone that seems to know why, but that’s something that everyone is battling. That definitely increases costs be- cause mite sprays are quite expensive. In shelling, the demand and marketability for hulls significantly decreased. The price of hulls dropped along with most feed commodities. That’s led a lot of shellers to increase prices in a year when increased prices are not welcome for most almond growers. At this time last year, almond hulls were worth about $150 a ton. Today’s price is about $48 a ton. All almond hullers use the income that they sell the hulls for to off- set the cost of the operation. Hullers have lost about three-quarters to two-thirds of their income from the hulls, so they’ve had to increase prices to the growers.
From a purely financial perspective, it’s great to have apple season start again. We started in late July with early varieties. Now we’re starting Honey Crisp harvest, our main variety. About 90% of what I grow are Honey Crisp and Fuji, and 10% are heirloom apples. August and September are the heavy harvest months for us. When we finish apples the first week of October, we start custom crushing olives (for oil) for other growers. Then we will begin our own olive har- vest in mid-November. It’s a really nice flow. For us in the coastal-influenced areas, the olives, which are alternate-bearing, are “on” this year. It would be an “off” year for the more inland areas. I have 21 varieties. Mine are high-density plantings, 15-by-15 feet. They’re freestanding, not trellised. We do a hybrid harvest where it’s not an over-the-row harvester. It’s battery-backpack operated pneumatic combs that oscillate and rake the olives off the trees onto shade cloth on the ground. I have a Rapanelli press that does 2 tons per hour. We custom crush for about 100 customers as well as our own. We end up crushing about 250 tons of olives per year, and that’s slowly growing over time. The business is still quite young. I started this farm in 2000, and I’ve had the press for about nine years. Everything is still evolving. One of the most exciting evolutions I’ve been doing since the pandemic is go- ing direct to customer a lot more. Now a sizable portion of our product is going to our own retail shop at the press. We do olive oil tastings and apple tastings. Selling direct has been financially great and very satisfying for me as a grower. I call it bringing the culture back to agriculture, reconnecting with the consumer. Now I get to meet them firsthand, and I get to hear how much they enjoy it, and they get to learn about the farm.
Chris Capaul Sutter County bean and rice farmer
We’re finishing irrigation on lima beans. On rice, we’re maintaining the water and looking to shut down on some of it soon, analyzing how well we did on weed control, which was trying this year. I had good results in some fields. In other fields, I’m not 100% happy. I took advantage of prevented planting (crop insurance) on a couple fields because with the (spring) rains, we were going to be late. One field had a weed problem, and it was resistant to sprays, so we left it out and did prevented planting. I used a different type of chemical, which worked on the watergrass. In another field, I knew I had what they call mimic (weed), and I tried something later because what we did initially didn’t seem to work. We tried one part of the field with two different things, and it thinned it down enough to where the rice was able to get ahead. We’re trying to experiment on our own. I worked with Grow West, and we did a test plot to see what works. We’re not always going to have prevented planting (insurance), so if we can do some of these tests while we have a field empty anyway, it’ll help agriculture in general. I’m not happy with the low price of rice. There’s a decent price (for beans) but no market. I didn’t get a contract, so I’m not happy about that. I only planted 100 acres. I usually do at least 200 to 400 acres of beans. If I don’t sell (this year’s crop) and what I have in storage, I’m looking at not knowing if I’m going to plant next year. We’ve got overproduction. A lot of that has to do with sunflowers going away. Syngenta pulled out, and people that had sunflower acres were look- ing for crops to plant. It’s going to kill the market. Lima beans is such a small market anymore.
4 Ag Alert September 4, 2024
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