From the Fields - Pat Wirz

By Pat Wirz, San Benito County cattle rancher and winegrape and walnut grower

The cattle are doing pretty good. We’re still feeding a bit of hay. The grass in our area is coming along well for this time of year. I’m guessing in another three weeks we’ll be able to turn out and we won’t be supplement feeding anymore for the season.

We raise our own supplement hay, and we had a really good hay crop this year. That cut down on some of the expenses over the past year because we didn’t have to buy hay. The year before, we had to buy quite a bit of extra hay. With the good year we had last year—and this year we’re running right at normal rainfall—we are doing fine. We had a storm last week, and we’re still getting showers. We have tarps over all our hay piles.

The market is holding pretty good. I generally sell in May or June when the cattle start coming out of the hills. I don’t sell much this time of the year, so I haven’t marketed anything for a while. We’re getting ready to start calving at the end of this month and in March.

In our vineyards, we are pruning. We’ve got about another month and a half to go. In a couple of weeks, we’ll start spraying the weeds around the vines. Everything is looking good. Our harvest was about normal. The price wasn’t too bad, and we were able to market all our grapes. We had a decent year.

In the walnut orchard, we’ve got a cover crop planted, and we’re waiting until things start happening in the spring. I bought the orchard last year from a neighbor who wanted to retire. The orchard bordered us, so we expanded. I’ve always had a few walnut trees, but not as many as I have now. They’re organic, so we planted the cover crop for nitrogen and the extra organic material it brings.