Insights from farmers and ranchers across the Golden State, including members of the California Farm Bureau.
Derek Lange Tulare County citrus grower and rancher
We’ll be harvesting navels, mandarins, minneolas and lemons for another six weeks or so. This area is 75% to 80% finished with the navel crop. Some smaller packinghouses are wrapping up, but the bigger independent ones will be picking navels into the second week of June. It’s a lighter crop. We had very heavy thrip damage, which causes a bit of scarring on the rind, but it doesn’t affect the eating quality. The packinghouses collectively decided to try to push the boundary on what fruit got packed into a fancy box and what got packed into a choice. The industry did a very good job keeping our pack- outs high early in the season, even with thrip damage as high as it was. Pack-outs and prices remained strong through Feb. 1. Packinghouses have started packing summertime Valencia oranges. We’ll prob- ably start picking our Valencias in the next two weeks. The crop looks good. We’re hoping for good, decent early sizes and decent pricing in the first part of the season. The juice plants that service our packinghouses are completely full, with wall-to- wall trucks of trailers filled with fruit waiting to be processed. Even though the juice price remains good on navels, the plant is not taking any fruit. I don’t know if it’s too much at one time, but I’ve never seen it to where they’re turning juice loads away. The packinghouses are either holding the fruit until it rots or dumping it. Some of it is being fed to cattle. We feed citrus year-round to our cattle, so we take a little bit of culled fruit, but nothing near the amount they’re needing to get rid of. The cow-calf operation looks very good. Feed on rangeland and pastures is very strong. We’re planning to not need to start feeding hay until June 15. We’re hopeful beef prices remain high. We’ll be weaning and shipping calves the middle of May. We’re hoping to sell into a strong market.
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May 1, 2024 Ag Alert 5
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