From the Fields - Pat Wirz

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

On winegrapes, we’re spraying our first round of sulfur for mildew protection. Our buds are just starting to break. They’re just opening up with about an inch and a half shoots. With all the nice rain that we had this year, everything’s coming out, and everything’s pushing real hard. They’re saying we might get a cold front coming in this week. I’m a little bit concerned about frost damage, but I hope we can get by without getting a frost. Sometimes when we get those cold fronts the first of May or end of April, we will get dinged a little bit with frost because I’m in the Cienega Valley in San Benito County, and we’re about a thousand feet. We’re kind of a sheltered valley, so if there’s any cold air, it’ll sometimes affect us.

As far as the cattle, the feed is just fantastic this year. We’ve got probably more feed this year than we’ve had for several years. Our normal rainfall is about 16 inches. This year we had 33 inches. We had a storm about the 10th of March, and we got 4 inches of rain overnight. The soil was so dry going into this winter that it soaked so much up. We’ve got a couple of reservoirs on one of our leased cattle pasture. All of our reservoirs are full this year and spilled over for the first time in probably four or five years.

It’s what California needed. At least where we’re at, if we didn’t have this kind of a year, I’m afraid we would’ve been in pretty bad shape. Everything was so dry last year that it was getting pretty serious.

I haven’t sold or shipped any of my calves yet, but I understand the price is pretty good because there’s a demand for cattle this year.