[AT] Agriculture in Coastal Central California and weather

[John B]

The machinery issue is the same with our 40 acre English walnut orchard. My two "new " tractors are early 1970's JD 2030 and 2630 models. I buy nothing new. The only way to make any money farming on this small scale is to buy used equipment and know how to maintain it and keep it running. Which can be a problem down the road as California Air Resources Board sooner or later will declare our old equipment illegal to use since the engines are not up to newer pollution standards.

I also do not do any of my own harvesting, either. It does not pay to own the equipment that will be used only a few days of the year. I have a nearby farmer and his crew harvest them- he spends about three months of the year harvesting almonds and walnuts for many other farmers and I know his total equipment inventory has to be between one and two million dollars. The only way he can afford it is by doing custom harvesting for others. By the way, my walnuts are an earlier variety and harvest finished up about a week ago. With our weekend rains, I see some of our neighbors with the later varieties having the shaken and windrowed walnuts on the ground, but unable to pick them up for another day or two until the ground dries out.

John Boehm
Woodland, CA
Visit my web site at http://vintagetractors.com


     At least we got our walnuts harvested on the day the rains started
before the rain started a week ago Saturday. Some farmers are still in the
position that their nuts are on the ground and that is a really bad thing
with precipitation. We had another farmer shake our little orchard, and then
we picked up the nuts by hand - lots of labor! But then I just bought a
harvester that I am hoping I can refurbish and use in the future. This will
naturally involve a lot of work, but hopefully the 1950's vintage machinery
will work well. There are plenty of other similar age units still in use in
California, but the issue will come soon of whether the pollution
regulations make it impossible to use these old but operational units. A new
set of harvesting machinery of this type for the Walnuts would exceed
$100,000 - possibly $200,000. Yes it would be faster, but it would not pay
for anyone at this point in our area to acquire a new setup because it would
never pay for itself with our small orchards.
     Does this sound typical of life as a farmer? It should!