From the Fields - Chris Lange

By Chris Lange, Fresno and Tulare counties citrus fruit grower and cattle producer 

The rain has slowed the harvest for this season, which is a drawback, but we want the rain. With these beautiful, sunny days that we’re having, we’re catching up on our harvest. We’re harvesting navel oranges, Minneola tangelos, mandarins, lemons and limes. We have crews working in Fresno and Tulare counties. The fruit quality has held up real well.

We would like to see prices go up. The one that’s lagging is lemon prices. Lemons had their heyday a few years back, and it seems every year there’s more imported fruit. For one reason or another, the demand and the prices are just weak. That’s something we hope will change in the near future.

We also raise Black Angus. We have our annual winter gathering, branding, inoculation and processing coming up. It takes a village to pull this off. We have cowboy volunteers and people from the community. It’s a full weekend of lots of fun with the intent of getting the cattle processed without injury to the cattle, horses, cowboys and spectators. We would normally do this a month earlier, but with all the rain, the growth of the grass and how slippery and muddy the conditions have been, we were forced to postpone it so that it would be a safer venue for everybody.

The cattle look great. The calves have already been born for this year. They will get their baby calf brands and ear tags and be inoculated, and then we’ll do the mother cows and the bulls. We’ll do our shipping in June.

We have close to a thousand acres of pasture, and we raise hay. The winter forage hay is looking terrific. We don’t anticipate any feed problems. Because we have the abundance this year, we’ll probably keep more replacement heifers than we had the last few years because of the drought. I anticipate the herd will grow by about 10%.