From the Fields - Darrell Cordova

By Darrell Cordova, Stanislaus County tree nut farmer

We’re trying to get some weed spraying done in our almonds. We’re also trying to get rid of all the gophers and squirrels that seem to have multiplied this year.

Harvest was a little light. Even though we kept the water on it all the time, the heat just dried them up. The weight is definitely down. The heat brought on the mites, which were a real issue this year. Other bugs increased too, like the navel orangeworm. We saw high trap counts. We had to spray for navel orangeworm and mites in some fields. We had to do that on walnuts as well. The bug issue and having to keep water going all the time added to the overall cost.

Another problem we had this year was broken branches because of the weight of the nuts or we had a lot of wind. We have to go through and clear all the rows before we could do anything else. After we finished harvesting, we cleared the rows before we added any water.

We try to maintain the quality. With the heat, there was even some burning of the leaves and on the outside (of the nuts), so we had to increase the water to maintain the fullness of the nut. The pistachios are on drip and don’t require a lot of water, so that wasn’t bad at all. We did put some fertilizer on the pistachios. Before too long, we’ll be putting on compost as well.

Almond prices are starting to move up a little bit, but they’re still not very high. We’d like to see them a lot higher because all our costs have gone up so much. Our harvest cost is higher. The fertilizer cost was huge compared to last year. Everything had gone up except for our commodity prices. That makes it hard because you’re running on a tighter budget, so it makes for a very challenging year.