Dan Errotabere Fresno County farmer
I grow almonds, pistachios, winegrapes, garlic, onions, cotton, barley and garbanzo beans. Most harvesting is done. We’re getting down to the last two or three crops be- fore turning our total focus to next year. We completed harvest of almonds and pistachios. Almonds came in a little below average on yields, but our insect damage was pretty minimal. Pistachios came in better than expected. The cotton is getting ready for foliation in another week. We are cautiously optimistic about the crop. The cotton market is very tight. We’re hoping for better prices later on. Tomatoes started off really well, but the mold started becoming a problem. We were able to deliver all our crop, but I know others have had difficulty. Winegrapes came in lower than we expected. We had a lot of shatter in our berries. We’re harvesting garlic. Yields look average. We’re about halfway through. We’re doing land prep on some of the permanent crops, getting them ready for the coming year. We’re working our open ground where we had tomatoes and garlic. We pulled out a third of our almond acreage this year. Probably in a couple years we’ll take another third out. We didn’t have garbanzos this year just because we started the year off pretty dry, and we didn’t get it planted. We’ll probably have some next year. The last few years were really dry, so we’ve been fallowing quite a bit of the farm. This year, the outlook went from being too dry to the difficulty of it being too wet. The most challenging input costs are labor and fuel. Trying to find good workers is difficult. We try to hold on to our long-term workers. This year, we were able to harvest everything on a timely basis. We’ll be farming more next year because we have the wa- ter. The challenge will be getting our work staff geared up enough to farm our ranch.
Photo/Cecilia Parsons
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October 11, 2023 Ag Alert 5
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