From the Fields - Thomas Chandler

By Thomas Chandler, Fresno County farmer

All our canals are full in our irrigation district, and all the recharge ponds are full. We’re trying to take as much canal water as possible to irrigate our crops, so we’re not using our pumps very much. In the Kings River area, we should have water all year long. It looks like we have enough water to potentially fill our reservoir more than three times; that’s how much snow we have. It is a shame we don’t have more places to store the water.

We are pruning our younger almond orchards and wrapping up fertilizing our almonds. With the rainy weather in February and March, it was difficult to fertilize almonds, so we got behind, but I think that should be OK.

It looks negative for almonds. We have carryover inventory that we’re trying to sell, so the market is down. The crop is 40% off because of poor pollination, and we may have some slight frost damage. After this year, we’re looking at pulling out some of our close to 20-year-old blocks. We lost a lot of trees from storms and wind damage, so that’s going to force our hand to push those out. We’re still trying to decide as a family whether to go back into almonds or plant more citrus or something else. It’s tough to want to go back into almonds given how bad the market is.

The crop is light on citrus too. We are spraying for thrips. Thrips have been pretty bad this year. All our navels have had thrips. We haven’t quite seen it on our mandarins yet, but we’re watching with anticipation that we’re going to need to spray those. We’re trying to do whatever we can. It is a valuable crop. The crop yields look like they’re going to be off this year.

In winegrapes, since the weather has been cool, we’re trying to stay on top of the fungicide applications and are training young vines that we planted.