John Pierson SolanoCounty cattle rancher
The price of hay is up. What we normally would pay is probably $90 to $110 in hay; it will be $180 a ton this year. I bought it early, and the
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same oat hay, same quality is now up to $260, so that’s considerably more than what we normally pay for our hay. The price of water continues to rise. Our usage has gone up this year. The month of June on our small farm, it cost $900, $1,000 for water on 18 acres. It is really expensive this year. It’s expensive be- cause the ground has taken more water. Our pasture is in decent shape. It’s dead pasture, dry land, but we’ve got pas- ture. We have irrigated pasture as well, so it’s in decent shape that way. It’s just our expense to raise the grass is a lot more than it’s been in the past. We did reduce our herd to about half its size, but it was more due to loss of pasture than the drought. We lost a lease. That’s just the way things go. I don’t follow the market that closely. When I need to sell, I sell. We sell pure- bred, and those prices have not been af- fected a great deal. Naturally, people have cut down (on cattle purchases), so (sales of purebred) will slow down. We can weather that; we’re not large scale. The beef industry in the long run looks bright. Prices are coming up a little bit. If you listen to all the reports, they say it’s going to be a brighter future. We’ll see. George Tibbitts ColusaCounty rice grower Much of the rice in the Sacramento Valley is now in
the heading stage, right on schedule. In a few weeks, growers will begin closely monitoring
their fields in order to decide when to drain them. Once drained, a field typically takes about three weeks to dry out enough for harvest equipment to be able to move in without getting stuck in the mud. Ideally, if a grower has timed it right, the grain has dried down to a proper moisture content right about the same time as the field is ready to support the harvest equipment. Although we unfortunately had no rain in March or April, it did make it easy to get in the fields and get them all planted earlier than usual. I was all done by early May. I remember a few wet years when we didn’t even start field work until then.
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4 Ag Alert August 4, 2021
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