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/Rob Andrew
Photo/Emma Plenty
Mikayla Gnoss Yolo County olive farmer
Endeavour Shen San Diego County hydroponic vegetable farmer
At the moment everything is looking nice and green, but of course that also in- cludes the weeds. We’re staying on top of them and are strip spraying. We have also been working on some cleanup from harvest. We started harvest mid-Octo- ber and ended up going into December this year because of those early rains. It was great to get the water, but it definitely slowed things in the field. Overall har- vest was delayed about 10 days because it was too wet to get in. Thankfully, we were able to get the entire crop in and produce some really good oil this year. As for the trees themselves, they’re not doing much growing this time of year. Olives are evergreen trees, but they do still go through a period of reduced growth and activity during the winter. While they have their rest, we are working on pre- paring for the upcoming season. Lord knows it will be here soon enough. We get the fertilizer plans ready, develop our pruning strategies and order trees to replace any we lost during the last year, things like that. We also applied for the Healthy Soils Program through the California Department of Food and Agriculture recently, so we’re waiting to hear on that. Hopefully, we will be able to secure some funding to plant a cover crop and establish a hedgerow on one of our younger ranches. We are also working on developing some new acres over the next two years, so there’s a lot to do in preparation for that. We have some ground work to do, and irrigation needs to be installed. Labor is always a concern— and water, of course. But we’re confident we’ll make it work. As for the market, it’s great to have all the new-season oil ready to go. We secured some pretty big contracts in the last year, so our bottling team has been working nonstop to get orders filled and out to the retailers. We’ve seen outstanding demand for California-produced extra-virgin olive oil, so we’re al- ways on the lookout for new potential growers.
We grow all kinds of leafy greens, from butter lettuces, romaine to Asian varieties like bok choy, tong ho, tatsoi. We have production every week be- cause we’re inside a greenhouse, and wintertime is the best time to grow leafy greens. We were trying to expand delivery of our produce boxes outside our ter- ritory, but we had problems with the deliveries not getting there on time, so we decided to shrink our territory to deliver in the San Diego County area only. We try to purchase from local farmers. We also deal with a distributor because we want variety in the box, but (the produce) must be organic and (grown in the) United States. We do 300 to 400 deliveries a week. Greenhouse-wise, hydroponic growing is really like a lab. You pay attention to the plant, to all your machines, making sure it’s done properly. It’s not a lot of hard labor. It’s just attention to very minute details like the mineral con- tent, the electrical conductivity, making sure the monitoring probes are clean, making sure there’s actual fertilizer and water in the tank. If it’s really hot and muggy, you’ve got to make sure to turn on the fan. We just did our first planting of strawberries a couple weeks ago. We’ll see how well the strawberries grow. We want to make an entertainment area, like a farm experience in the greenhouse. It’s very small scale, like only 1,500 square feet. We’re just testing how to grow it first. If it works, I’m going to find a different piece of property and buy it using USDA support. Hopefully, I can go from there and try to build our own greenhouses. It took me five years to really understand lettuce. Who knows how long to understand strawberries. There’s a whole bunch of methods you’ve got to figure out, from fertilizing to watering cycle. That’s what we’re working on now.
Janet Kister San Diego County nursery producer It has been a roller coaster weather year for our plants the last few months, but we are certainly grateful for the rain we did get. Late last year we had warmer-than-normal temperatures that pushed our plants to become ready earlier than needed. Now, with cooler-than-average temperatures, the plants are ready later than planned. It’s always an adventure for us and our customers! On a positive note, demand for flowers and plants remains strong. As more offices reopen, they are busy having their interiors and exteriors replanted. And the work- from-home employees continue to add plants to enhance their workspace. What started as increased interest in indoor plants in 2018, to bring the natural world indoors, went crazy in 2019 as young people opted to become “plant parents” instead of having children or pets. That exploded during the pandemic as family activ- ities and a lifestyle of “greenifying” the home was embraced. It appears this trend is continuing into 2022.
Photo/Courtesy Janet Kister
4 Ag Alert February 2, 2022
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