By Michael David Fischer, Calaveras County cattle rancher

I’m a cow-calf operator. It was an awfully dry January, but we had some mild weather and good little storms here and there in February, and the grass growth has been good, so we haven’t had to supplement an awful lot of hay. The rain we’ve had is a little less than what we normally have, but it’s enough to keep the grass going. We’ve had a good March so far. We’ve had a lot of heavy showers and rain. Hopefully, we’ll keep getting little showers here and there through May to keep the grass coming. 

The cattle look good. Because of the drought years, I was at least 25% down on numbers. The last two or three years I’ve been trying to slowly increase my numbers. I’m probably back about 15%. I run my own capital, so I have to sell calves to be able to pay for the ones that I saved, so I’ve been building slowly as I can. It grows on grass conditions, and it grows on the amount of cost you can feed them. I raise my own heifers, so I don’t buy cattle normally to restock. This year I debated buying, but the prices were so good at the yard, I didn’t want to spend the money.

A lot of times you could buy good cattle out there, but they don’t fit in your operation, and it takes a while to get them to the routine of the actual area that you live in and the climate here. I think it’s better to raise your own if you can. We buy good bulls to breed our cattle and keep a constant herd. 

By Jonathan Merrill, Monterey County vegetable grower

As a company, we specialize in partner contracts and grow for bigger brands that you’ll see in the grocery stores. The vast majority of what we do is driven by our customers, the shippers. They tell us certain amounts or acres per week. 

In January and February, we planted some of our winter crops like brassicas and leafy greens. March, April, May is when we start to ramp up once the rain winds down. We might have a few more systems roll through, but we’re ramping up quickly. In 90% of the Salinas Valley, irrigation is all well-driven, so the aquifer gets replenished by the rains and the reservoirs that are nearby. Our water table is healthy, but we could always use more (water). We still have some carryover from the last few seasons, especially when we got heavier rains in 2023.

Finding the right people at the right time and getting them in place and trained is always a challenge. But in terms of availability, labor has been OK. I coordinate the hoeing and the thinning crews. The development of technology, predominantly in thinning, has eliminated our reliance on labor. The crews that were doing thinning and hoeing, which was split 50-50, are now only doing hoeing, so their workload has shifted dramatically.

We’ve started to implement technology and automation, which helped make a volatile situation extremely predictable. Every field is now going to cost X, whereas in the past there was a range. A field could potentially be on the lower end or the higher end or an extremely high end in terms of cost. With automation, we know what the cost is going to be and can apply that across the full portfolio of crops that we do. This has helped alleviate our reliance on labor, but we’re always going to need labor to some degree, at least for the foreseeable future. We need to innovate and find new paths forward in the coming years.