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!
