Greg Panella LakeCounty pear grower
The Bartlett pear crop is a little lighter than average for us, but we’re picking out
OK. We started harvesting last week. It’s not necessarily un-
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common for it to get above 100 during har- vesttime. We pick early in the morning and we’re done by the heat of the day. We keep the workers out of heat and keep some wa- ter to the trees if you can. We’ve been using the same farm labor contractor and they are back this year with the same employees. We totally rearranged the camps this year to allow for proper social distancing, and we’re disinfecting everything multiple times a day and taking the pickers’ temperatures before they go into the field and doing everything we can to mitigate COVID. We didn’t have much warm weather during bloom this year, so most of our main buds didn’t set fruit. The result is we have a real staggered fruit size on the tree. There’s a lot of later flowers that came out that set smaller fruit this year, so it’s been difficult to get consistent size throughout the orchards, and tonnage is not there because there wasn’t enough heat to set the fruit. Derrick Lum SolanoCounty farmer We’re man- aging my small
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olive grove, main- taining it for next year’s crop. It’s an off year for my olive oil crop. It was a heavy crop last year.
The walnuts that I oversee at my brother’s ranch are an average crop this year, not a big production. We’re trying to manage the disease in it and maintain the water coming off this year. The submoisture is not there, so we’ve been irrigating more often. In the row-crop arena, I’m overseeing some of the land for a farmer that leases my land, so I’m watching the crop for him and managing his guys. We did notice that we had to irrigate quite more often because the submoisture is not there from the light rain in the spring. For all the crops, we have to do a little more irrigation this year. The persimmons look really good. It’s just that we had to irrigate a little more often to keep up the moisture. Persimmons size better when it gets cool. We’ve had a lot of hot days, so let’s see what happens this fall, because it’s a fall crop and we harvest in October. But there’s a good crop set on them. I’m overseeing sunflowers too. The sun-
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4 Ag Alert August 19, 2020
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