From the Fields ®
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Trevor Airola Calaveras County rancher
Debbie Chamberlain Riverside County farmer
Things are very optimistic right now. The grass is growing. We have had really good rainfall, and we just had a little bit of snow, so we’ve got some good mois- ture in the ground. Now we are getting some warm temperatures, which are real- ly helping the late-spring grass. All of our water is snow runoff, which is delivered through an open-ditch sys- tem. We have a riparian water right, which dates back to the Gold Rush era to divert water from the Stanislaus River. Our ditch system is one of the oldest ditch systems in California. We are starting to prepare for summer irrigation, so getting our ditches cleaned and getting our system up and running to make sure it is ready to start irrigation in the middle of May. To be proactive, the irrigation association that I’m part of voluntarily agreed to a 10% reduction in our water usage. Right now, we’re getting ready to do our second round of preventative vacci- nations on the calves. Then we’re going to wean them from the cows so that we can market those calves in June. I had three steers butchered last week. I’ll be selling those direct to consumers. This is my second year of selling direct to consumers. Doing this definitely extends my profit margin. It is more challenging to carry the overhead, such as the cost of feeding the steers. But it doubles my profit margin per head by doing it this way. New this year: I received a federal Conservation Stewardship Program grant to do prescribed grazing to promote better pasture management. This incen- tive grant is for moving the cows from pasture to pasture and managing feed quality and soil health. We move the cows around, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service samples our pasture and provides a report of how we’re doing in terms of managing feed quality and soil health, which helps me with management decisions.
We started our tomato season at the beginning of March, so we’re about half- way through our tomato season. We have five varieties of cherry tomatoes. We also have a few areas of squash and green beans that we’re finishing up. We’re also trying sweet peppers. Those are new, but we don’t do a lot. They’re little sideline items to go with the cherry tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes and basil are our main crops. The amount of greenhouses we now have in basil has grown. We’re also looking to increase it for next year. The mangos are flowering, so that’s normal, and it looks good. They’re alter- nate bearing, so some trees look heavy and some don’t. That’ll be ready for har- vest the beginning of July. It’s been extremely wet this year. The good side of it is we got free water, and mangos love it because they’re a tropical plant. We had a lot of cool, wet weather, so we’ve had some issues with powdery mildew, which killed some of our tomato plants. Our cherry tomatoes are in a hydroponic system. Even though they’re outdoors, they’re pretty dense because it was warm early on. Then we had all those storms come through. It was the perfect condition for powdery mildew. It’s affected some of the production, but not too bad. Some varieties are more resilient than others, so it seems like some things pick up the slack for other problems. Sungold is one that’s very susceptible, and it’s almost 40% of our cherry tomato varieties. Customers love that one. Sungold has a thin skin, and it’s tricky. When we had those rains, we had some splitting, and you have to dump that, because once they split, they go bad. Normally, we’re drier and it’s not as much of an issue. But I hear (about splitting) with the central California growers and coastal growers who try to grow Sungold. But (the variety) is hugely productive.
Madeline Desrochers Yuba County dairy farmer
We’re seeing record prices for our bull calves and Angus bull calves. We’ve been breeding some of our lower-producing cows to Angus. We started that a little over nine months ago, so some of those crossbred cows are now being born. Any calf that has a black coat is going to go for more. It’s very new for us, and we’re doing it on a small scale, not nearly as aggressively as some dairies. We’re seeing the benefits because prices are so high. We live close to the Sierra, and there’s a lot of smaller beef ranches around here. It’s their calving season. If they have a mama cow that loses her calf, they’re calling us looking for drop calves, so we’ve been selling some to the beef producers as well. The cows are producing a lot of milk because of this is beautiful weather. We’re milking the most cows we’ve ever milked because we purchased some last year from a neighbor that sold out, and we’re growing our herd. We’re grateful to have healthy cows because the national news is talking about bird flu and how that’s been knocking down milk production in cows in Texas, New Mexico, Idaho and several other states. We’re very blessed to not have that here. But we don’t live in fear. We’re not going to be scared that that’s going to happen to us. Hopefully, it will be helpful for milk prices for dairy farmers. It’s an unfortunate event, but it does knock supply down. Birds are always a problem. We have plenty of pigeons and starlings around this dairy. What can you do about that? We are in the Pacific Flyway. We haven’t seen as many migratory birds this year as far as the geese and ducks. There’s only so much you can do when you house as much feed as we do. They want to come here and eat all of the feed and grain.
4 Ag Alert April 17, 2024
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