On the Farm in 2015

On the Farm in 2015

By Paul H. Betancourt

December 2015

With another year in the books it is fair to ask how things went on the farm this past year.

            The year has had its challenges. The weather has been good, except for that rainfall thing. But, warm weather makes for good farming, usually. Yields were down for most crops. There seem to be a lot of reasons for that. Prices are softening, which is not unexpected. We all like higher prices, but it is the nature of things that prices cycle up and down.

            The drought is obviously the big news in California. There are tens of thousands of acres around our farm that have been fallowed. Production of row crops like cotton and wheat are way down as farmers conserve. What water they have for permanent crops like grapes and almonds. Letting a wheat field go fallow for a year hurts, but if you don’t water a vineyard or orchard for a year you kill it and lose years of work.

            On our farm we are preparing to install another drip system. I did the math a few weeks ago when a friend asked what the drought had cost me personally. Over a three year period we will have spent $400,000 in drip systems and well repairs. I’m not complaining, my pockets are not that deep. Some day I would like to be out of debt.

A while back a neighbor said, “All the indicator farmers are gone.” Huh? I asked what he meant by that. He said all the weak managers are gone. All the poor money managers are gone. All we have left now are the survivors.

One of the things that cracked me up this past year is that no sooner had the long range forecasts started saying we had a strong El Nino event coming and people started saying, “Even if we have a big El Nino rain event that won’t mean the drought is over.” Actually, that is exactly what it would mean. Droughts are when it does not rain. Droughts are over when it starts to rain. What they seem to be saying is, “We want all the water whether it rains or not.”

            Yes, we have had low rainfall the past few years. That happens in California. I have said before, we have wet years and dry years. We are fools because we do not save water from the wet years for the dry years. We have made this drought worse because of how the government has managed the water supply. We had a six year drought from 1986-1993 and we had more water available for our cities and farms. Eric Johnson of The Water Agency has documented how we have more water in storage at the Shasta Reservoir in this drought than we did in the ’86-93 drought. This has caused a lot more pain in our cities and farms than was necessary.

            Technology is always on the move. There are more and more electronics on the farm and in farmers’ pick up trucks all the time. Even drones are on the farm. A former student is starting a business doing aerial videos by drone. It gives you such a good birds’ eye view that birds attacked his drone while we were filming and clipped one of the rotors. The next step will be infrared videos which will help track stress and pests in the plants. Pretty amazing.

            There is also more paperwork. I am starting to not like January. It is too foggy to go for a motorcycle ride and there are all sorts of forms to fill out. Have I mentioned how much farmers really don’t like paper work lately? It was one of the perks of the job. You may be up and dawn and work past sunset. You may freeze in the winter and bake in the summer. You may end up knee deep in mud and muck, but you didn’t have to sit and do paperwork. Well, that’s over. Now we have to report our fertilizer use. We already track that because it is a cost. But, now we have to attend meetings and fill out forms. Arrrgh. I do not see an end to this. In fact, I suspect it will get worse as time goes on. I do not make my living filling out forms. I make my living growing food. Society does not benefit from me filling out forms. Society benefits when I grow food.

As we head in to 2016 the survivors have hope. We hope the predictions of an El Nino year are correct. We hope some of that will end up as water for our farms.

I'll check in with you all again after the first of the year.

We wish you all the Merriest of Christmases and the Happiest of New Years.

Peace on Earth. Good food for all!