From the Fields® - July 20, 2022

By Jason Miller, Placer County beekeeper and mandarin grower

Our honeybees spend the spring in California and the summers in North Dakota, so I'm currently traveling between Newcastle and Gackle, North Dakota. Last week, I took delivery of our company's first electric truck, which should help reduce our fuel costs.

We have been doing our best to fight inflation by not increasing our pollination prices these last couple of years. Unfortunately, the world has run the other direction and hit us with massive price increases across the board. We buy our sugar syrup by the tanker, and those prices almost doubled this season, now topping $23,000 per load. Our freight to haul bees was $5 to $6 per mile, also nearly doubling this season. The spring rainfall has continued in the Dakotas, where we hope to improve from our spectacular honey crop failure of last summer.

This year started with us working more hours than I ever thought possible. The reason being our H-2A labor crew from Mexico was delayed three weeks due to the Department of Labor misfiling our labor application. This meant the bees arrived in California for the spring almond pollination, but we had no beekeepers to place and inspect the hives. Fortunately, by mid-February, our 16 H-2A employees arrived. The bees benefited from excellent almond pollination weather, and colonies experienced low winter losses. This was followed by a couple of nice spring rain events in the foothills. In June, the green grass of the foothills turned to scorched earth, so we loaded the bees and headed to the Midwest.

By Debbie Chamberlain, Riverside County mango and vegetable farmer

We're two weeks into our main variety of mango called Valencia Pride. It's the one we have the most trees of. The harvest looks good so far—good sizing taking place. We probably have four to five weeks to go of that variety. After that, we have probably until Sept. 1 to finish off another variety, the Keitt mango.

We finished two early varieties. Nam Dok Mai, a Thailand mango, comes off first. That was the end of June. They call that the dessert mango of Thailand. It's a smaller-size mango, very sweet, very low fiber. We also finished Golden Lady, which is a variety that we developed in our field. It's from a Haden seedling also, but it's golden with a red blush, and it's very sweet and medium fiber. We also have a few Manilas. The mango has alternate-bearing tendencies, so with these first varieties, we did have a lower yield. But our main variety is looking real good, and so does the Keitt, which was low last year.

We really work hard to make sure it's a standout product—picking mangos tree-ripe. They don't have to go through that hot water bath that all imported mangos have to go through. It really affects the flavor.

The other things we're doing is adding more greenhouse, because we need to increase our basil production during our tomato season. We've had really good demand for (basil). We're building more shade houses to get increased mango (tree) reproduction, because we also sell mango trees retail.

We do these other projects during the offseason to increase production based on our past results, so that's been good news despite all the increase in costs. We're just inching up (production) to meet demand. Of course, we've had to increase prices because of all the increased costs, but fortunately, (the products) are still in demand.

By Glenn Tanaka, Orange County agritourism operator

What was really nice about springtime is a lot of schools did come back into taking field trips again. Our weekday business was fairly good. In fact, we probably had a lot more non-schoolchildren, families coming out on the weekdays, which was quite refreshing.

This summer, with the economy so unstable, it was like in 2008. People are maybe a little leery of not having enough money to go on extravagant vacations, so they're staying close to the home. Maybe we'll have a little bit more local business.

We grow most of our own fruits and vegetables, but we ran into a little gap in our planting schedule, so we ran a little short on corn. We were trying to buy some corn on the market, and it was outrageous. It was $60, $70 a crate, when normally it's $20 a crate. There wasn't as much corn being grown because of the water shortage, and whatever corn was available, they're trying to get premium dollar for it.

Our strawberry season finished a couple weeks ago. We're in our summer crops, which is corn and watermelon, so we have our watermelon tours going on right now. What's nice about strawberries is people get to go out and pick their own. With watermelons and cantaloupes, it's a little hard for them to pick their own because it's so hard to tell what's ripe, so we pre-pick it for them. We let them sample all kinds of different melons, so they still have a good time on the tours.

The future looks good. Our sales are actually up a little bit over last year, so we're happy with that.

By Jay Ruskey, Santa Barbara County coffee and fruit farmer

Coffee harvest started in May. It's a little early because of the warm winter we had. Harvest is going to continue for the next few weeks here and in San Diego County. We've got a couple more farms that we are going to be planting with coffee. All the farms that are a little more inland have been planted. We try to get them in the ground sooner so they have a longer time to establish, especially before the heat comes.

We're wrapping up avocados. We're pulling them off right now, and they're at maximum maturity. A lot of our (coffee) growers are avocado growers too, so they've been very excited to get the extremely high prices that are still hovering around $3 a pound, which are incredibly higher than we've ever experienced. Some of our lemon growers are finally done with their spring harvest that went late because of market forces, and they're beginning to prune and get ready for the next crop.

From a weather standpoint, it was obviously a dry spring for everybody, but the winds were really beating us up. The winds were present all the way into June, which normally doesn't happen. On the coastal corridors of the farming community, we finally found relief through the fog and the marine layer cooling us down at night and bringing some relief. Everybody is preparing for heat and watching well levels carefully.

As water supplies begin to decrease, a suggestion for growers is to start watching salt levels, because as reservoirs and aquifers get more concentrate, we're all going to notice higher levels of salt. Measuring your soils and staying on top of your leaching requirements are going to be critical for the next four or five months until we get our winter rains.