From the Fields - Ray Yeung

This year was interesting because it was a really wet spring, and now it’s this record heat, so we’re having to deal with that. We’re heavily irrigating the processing tomatoes because we’re afraid all the flowers are going to fall off. We’re also trying to keep the pistachios irrigated. Everything looks good, but looking good and what we get at harvest are two different things.

We grow fresh-market heirloom tomatoes, and because the spring was really cool, we were worried they weren’t going to be ripe on time. But everything has caught up because of this latest heat wave.

We finished harvesting our triticale, which is for feed. Prices are really bad this year. We also grow a lot of alfalfa. It’s tough because prices are not good for a lot of these commodities. With alfalfa, we can hardly sell it because the prices are so bad and no one wants it. We sell it to a broker, but we’ll sell it to anybody with animals that wants it.

I don’t understand what’s going on. I’ve been on the farm for almost 40 years, and I’ve never seen a year like this where it was so good one year and then so bad the next. People have said they’ve never seen anything like this. I think because the price of hay was so high the last few years, livestock people have thought of alternative ways to feed their animals other than depending on hay. Maybe that has something to do with it.

Everything is down. For us, it all started when we lost the (contract on) sunflowers. The processing tomato price is down, but it’s not as bad as the other ones. Grain prices are down to what they were in the ‘70s. We grow fresh-market tomatoes for the restaurants, and they have challenges too because they have to pay more wages, and the economy is bad, so it’s a tough deal this year.