From the Fields - Alex Jack
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By Alex Jack, Imperial County vegetable farmer
We’re about 80% through our winter vegetable season. We’ll go until about the first week of April. So far, it’s been a pretty good year. We’ve had struggles with a very cool winter, quite a few days of lettuce ice and a few rainy and windy days. But considering all things, the crops are doing very well.
A lot of people’s crops are down a bit because of the unusual weather. The main reason our crops are doing so well is we switched to mostly drip irrigation on our vegetables. We changed our fertilizer program around. We expanded our acres quite a bit using drip. Our water usage is down, but our yields are the highest they’ve ever been. We’re having tremendous yields with our lettuce and romaine crops. One of the companies I grow for has told their other growers to start getting ready to do things the way I’ve been doing just because our success has been so great.
The markets early on were extremely good. The last four to five weeks, the prices have been a bit suppressed, but because my yields are so high and my cost per unit is almost $2 a box lower than conventional, I’m having a pretty good year even on mediocre prices at the moment.
After the vegetable crops, we’ll plant wheat and Sudan grass. I’ll rent some of my ground out to a friend that grows cantaloupes and sweet corn on it. With the water situation, we’re going to leave about 15% of our ranch fallow in the spring and through the summer, just to help the overall water situation. They’re saying the Imperial Valley is not going to have any cutbacks in 2023, but we still need to be cognizant that Lake Mead and Lake Powell are very low. Even though we have our full allocations, we need to be responsible stewards of the land and water and try to conserve what we can.