From the Fields - Jim Rickert

By Joe Colace, Imperial County melon and vegetable farmer, packer and shipper

We’ve been getting pretty darn good rains, and it’s been fairly warm. Cattle prices are high. It’s been a reasonably good grass year.

Wild rice prices are strong as they’ve been in a long time. We got decent crops last year. We also grow alfalfa and grass hay, and hay prices are down quite a bit—25%, 30% from a year ago. A lot of people during the drought sold a lot of cattle. Export markets have also dropped off. The Chinese and people from the United Arab Emirates have not been buying as much hay.

I’m keeping herds about the same. The classic dilemma for a cattleman is if you have a calf born now and you keep it as a heifer, it takes her two years to have a calf, and then it takes another 18 months to two years for that animal to be ready to be marketed. It’s hard to guess what the market is going to be four years from now. I think 2024 and 2025 are going to be good, but who knows what it’s going to be in 2028 or 2029. I’m 75 years old. I’m kind of like, how hard do I want to fight this?

We’ve rented land and taken cattle to the foothills of Colusa County for about 30 years. But I sold some cows in the fall, and for the first time in 30-some odd years, I’m not grazing any cattle in Colusa County. Prices were record high, so it wasn’t like I did bad on them.

We’ve had reasonably good grass years. The input costs are still going up. That diminishes your enthusiasm for growing your herd. All things considered, I think we’re going to have good grass in the foothills. I think we’re going to have relatively wet conditions and good moisture in the upper elevations on the summer pasture.