From the Fields: Mike Vereschagin, Glenn County almond and prune grower

We’re just about done pruning. I use a farm labor contractor to hire the pruning crew for the older orchards and keep my men busy with the younger trees when there isn’t fieldwork to do, so I can keep them busy year-round. We’re starting to put down strips in the orchard rows to control weeds. We are cleaning up orchards and checking irrigation systems so we can be ready to do frost control. 

We’re waiting for bloom. We’re starting to see some early bud swell on the almonds, especially on the earlier varieties. 

Conditions have been dry for almost a month. I’ve seen a few neighbors running a bit of water on the orchards. I plan to add some more moisture to the orchards. With our luck, it will probably start raining when we’re blooming, which we don’t need.  

There’s always concern about the year’s water allocation. Right now, it’s looking pretty good for the North State for the Central Valley Project, but if we don’t get more rain, we may not get 100% of our allocation. I’m involved in our water district, and we’re in our second year of groundwater recharge projects. To start, I recharged 5 acre-feet per day, and now it’s down to about 2½ acre-feet per day. I’m getting close to 400 acre-feet into the groundwater aquifer. Other growers are doing the same to show the state we can comply with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. We monitor wells, and the levels are definitely coming up from the groundwater recharge, so hopefully it will allow us to get more water in the future. 

For last season’s prune crop, a lot of growers were down in tonnage, so we had less fruit going through our prune dryer. But my tonnage was up. We had an average almond crop.  

Crop prices are depressed, and our expenses keep going up, so margins are getting tighter. That’s a concern to every grower.