From the Fields - Chris Capaul

By Chris Capaul, Sutter County bean and rice farmer

We’re finishing irrigation on lima beans. On rice, we’re maintaining the water and looking to shut down on some of it soon, analyzing how well we did on weed control, which was trying this year. I had good results in some fields. In other fields, I’m not 100% happy. I took advantage of prevented planting (crop insurance) on a couple fields because with the (spring) rains, we were going to be late. One field had a weed problem, and it was resistant to sprays, so we left it out and did prevented planting.

I used a different type of chemical, which worked on the watergrass. In another field, I knew I had what they call mimic (weed), and I tried something later because what we did initially didn’t seem to work. We tried one part of the field with two different things, and it thinned it down enough to where the rice was able to get ahead. We’re trying to experiment on our own. I worked with Grow West, and we did a test plot to see what works. We’re not always going to have prevented planting (insurance), so if we can do some of these tests while we have a field empty anyway, it’ll help agriculture in general.

I’m not happy with the low price of rice. There’s a decent price (for beans) but no market. I didn’t get a contract, so I’m not happy about that. I only planted 100 acres. I usually do at least 200 to 400 acres of beans. If I don’t sell (this year’s crop) and what I have in storage, I’m looking at not knowing if I’m going to plant next year. We’ve got overproduction. A lot of that has to do with sunflowers going away. Syngenta pulled out, and people that had sunflower acres were looking for crops to plant. It’s going to kill the market. Lima beans is such a small market anymore.