Insights from farmers and ranchers across the Golden State, including members of the California Farm Bureau.
Larry Cox Imperial County farmer
We’re right in the middle of red and yellow bulb onion harvest on our ranch. Everybody got hit with mildew, probably from the middle of March to the middle of April, and it set size for most people back a little bit but not dramatically. We’ll be running onions through the 10th of June. The onion crop looks good. The pricing on red onions is exceptionally good and adequately good for yellow onions, so we’re optimistic. We are thrashing wheat. The acreage on wheat is up but not necessarily because the market is good but because of a lack of profitable alternatives. Sudan acres are down dramatically this year because of such poor pricing on exports last year. We cut our sudan acres in half. We are baling hay, and the price is cheap on it. The qual- ity has not been great as far as testing for protein, but things look a little bit better on the latest cutting compared to a month ago. On lettuce and some other crops, everything moved back to the Salinas area around April 10. The markets have been surprisingly good on iceberg and romaine due to reduced plantings because of heavy mildew pressure and some soil diseas- es, whether it is fusarium or rhizoctonia. There was a little bit of rain damage too. There’s a heavy dose of anthracnose in a lot of fields in Salinas and Santa Maria. We are harvesting at our Mexicali ranch. We’ve got chili peppers going full blast— serranos, jalapeños and Anaheim chilis. The markets are good. We started those around April 10, and we’ll go until early June. We’re also harvesting green beans. For our green onion production, those have a lot of mildew because of rains and light winds during February and March. We don’t grow corn, but the sweet corn harvest is going full bore down here in the Imperial Valley, and cantaloupe harvest is starting to get ready to go pretty quickly.
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