out there, the market wasn’t that good. I think they were in the mid-$40 range per box on cherries, and normally when we’re picking our earlier varieties, we’re in the mid-$60s and $70s. We had really good production—I think that helped us out—and good quality, but the market wasn’t there. As far as COVID, we changed some of our practices, kept our employees apart. Where and when possible, they’re work- ing on their own, in their own field doing their own jobs. We minimized workers being around each other. Obviously, we had to do the sanitizing and they had to
the beginning of September. We were a little bit later on those, but overall, I think industry-wide everybody’s been saying they’re a week to 10 days early. With Tulares and Howards, there’s been a lot of dark walnuts, a lot of blows, meaning they have no meat in them. Everybody was expecting heavy produc- tion this year, and looking at the walnuts you probably thought you got it, but I’d say 20% to 30% is going out the back end of the garbage because there’s no meat in them. The only thing I can relate it to is maybe the heat, that late heat clear into September. The market is down, so we were hop- ing the heavier tonnage would make up for the poor market, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I think we’re go- ing to be off of the yield estimate. The walnuts that are good are really nice; there is good quality there. We have our own processor and we process and sell our own walnuts, and walnuts going to the processor are actually looking really nice. The hullers are doing a good job at cleaning them up. Even though it’s a poor market, I don’t think buyers will be disappointed. It’s going to be really good quality to them. In cherries, we just finished our af- ter-harvest pruning. Other than that, we’re doing minor irrigation just to keep some moisture in the soil. The quality was really nice in cher- ries. I don’t know if this whole COVID thing put a damper on the market, be- cause for the quality of fruit that was
in different areas in different ways, so now we’ve got to harvest it. They’ll pro- cess it just the same, and then you’ve got to see if the flower is good enough for fresh market or, is it going to need to go to biomass for oil extraction? If it gets into the oil side of things, you can remediate it out pretty easily, but with the fresh mar- ket, it gets you out of that real fast. Our almonds came in pretty good this year. We were above our average this year. They haven’t processed them yet. They’re just picking them up off the ground. The alfalfa is pretty common; it is what it is. We harvested wheat and it made good protein. Yields were good. And the carrots—that’s tried and true. Nick Solari San JoaquinCountywalnut and cherry grower We’re har-
ized we were going to have a problem early on from a yield perspective. The quality this year for the consum- ers was very good. We had a lot of large fruit and it was with high sugar. The grades were great. Prices were decent. We just didn’t have as much fruit as we would’ve liked. After harvest, we spend most of our time going through and cleaning up the blight that wasn’t cut before harvest. Now we’re doing preparation for some herbicide control to get the weeds down. Oftentimes, maybe 50% to 75% of the time, we put a fall phosphate fertilizer down for the next year, but with a light crop, the trees are in pretty good shape, so we’re probably not going to add ad- ditional fertilizer this year in the fall for this crop, just because the trees were not very stressed with a big crop this year. We’ll start looking at pruning in December, so we’ll get our pruning crews out. Every year, labor gets a little bit more difficult. We had trouble with harvest this year. We had a lot of small crews because of COVID. We probably had three or four days of delay over the course of the week, just because we had smaller crews and it took us longer to pick, and that was primarily due to COVID. If we had had a big crop this year, it would have been very difficult to get it picked during the season. We would have stretched (harvest) into the Lake County and even Oregon/Washington fruit, if we hadn’t had a small crop.
eat lunches separately. Doug Dickson SacramentoCounty pear grower
We’re finished
with harvest. We have both Bartletts and
vesting walnuts. We’re still finish- ing up the early varieties, Tulares and Howards. Chandlers are kind of holding off, probably be-
Boscs. We pick the Bartletts first and then the
Boscs second, and we finished (harvest) around the 15th of August. Harvest this year was, on average, about 50% of normal. Quality was very good because we didn’t have that big a fruit set. We had some cold weather during the bloom time. It got down to the low 30s a couple of days, and we just didn’t have a lot of blooms that set. We had a lot of bloom drop after the bloom was over. We real-
cause of the heat, so we’re going to try to start test-shaking some (Chandlers) this weekend and see how those come down. We’ll probably finish up with our Chandlers maybe the third week in October. We have an early variety called Ivanhoe, and normally we pick that the end of August. This year we picked it
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STILLFARMING
October 7, 2020 Ag Alert 5
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