From the Fields - Joe Cataldo

By Joe Cataldo, San Joaquin County farmer

In cherries, we had good quality, a lot of production and ideal weather, so everything was lined up for a great season. At the end of the day, the market didn’t perform the way it needed to, and it got to a point where you would go backwards financially if you continued to harvest. A lot of people stopped picking. We are still receiving 1998 pricing, but we have 2024 costs. We aren’t able to recover pricing to cover high costs of gas, diesel, fertilizer and other inputs. Crop insurance doesn’t make up for the losses.

The winegrape business is equally messed up, if not more. With fewer people drinking wine and consumers having less expendable income, there are still years of juice in inventory.

There are a lot of grapes still hanging on the vine. They probably won’t get picked because contracts were not renewed. Large wineries are importing juice from other regions and countries and blending it, which harms the farmer. There was a bit of a short crop on the whites, so a lot of these varietals got picked because there was demand. Our chardonnay did well. As long as you have a contract, you can make it work, but production was down. One of the worst casualties is the old-vine zinfandel.

If you’re going to be farming, you have to be big and generational or on the smaller side and do the work yourself. You can make it if you bottle and sell it yourself and have a cult following because it’s a historic vineyard. But if you’re a thousand-acre grower with 30 employees and millions of dollars in overhead and debt, it’s tough.

We may need to scale back and pivot to things that are more niche-driven and custom. We have a mechanical pruning business, so we top and hedge orchards, which helps keep the lights on. Plus, I work as a field operations manager for a cherry packing company.