From the Fields - Chris Lange

By Chris Lange, Tulare County citrus and table olive grower and cattle rancher

We’ve been harvesting lemons, mandarins and early navels. We started early navels and some mandarins about Nov. 8. We’ve finished Valencias, and we’ve also finished olives. The trees look terrific. Of course, we’ve had two wet years, so that’s beneficial.

We’ve had some cool temperatures, but not cold enough to run wind machines. We have a very good tasting citrus crop. The problem is undersized fruit, unlike last year, when we didn’t have many pieces of fruit on the tree and the fruit was oversized. The sugar-acid ratio is very good, and it’s been cool enough to bring on the color and keep the sugars high.

We’re coming into the holiday season, and a lot of buyers have already bought and put fruit in storage. Harvest will pick up in January.

The olive crop was much bigger than the estimates. What the canners are paying easily covers the cost of harvesting. We’ll make money on olives this year, but you’re not going to get rich. What handicaps growers and their bottom-line return is that harvesting costs are ever increasing. Labor is always going up. There’s more olives being pushed out. What’s available to the canners is shrinking all the time because I don’t see young olive groves going in. If the labor costs weren’t so high, then it could be quite good.

Beef prices are up. The calf crop is good, with cows having very high fertility levels. We have not had coyote predators attacking the calves. For the first time in my memory, we have not had packs of coyotes move in when the first calves are born. Over the years, the first calves are often killed by coyotes, maybe because of the drought and/or the coyote population. But this year, there haven’t been any. We still have a lot of good mountain pastures. Everybody is fat and happy, and all the ponds and water troughs are plentiful.