From the Fields - Ryan Indart

By Ryan Indart, Fresno County farmer and sheep rancher 

We already harvested our oranges back in February. The cherries are going to be harvested at the end of this week. We’re about two to three weeks behind schedule just because of the long, wet winter and the very cool spring. Same thing in the almonds. They were late to mature and develop. We had a lot of inclement weather in the spring, but we still managed to have some pretty good bloom days, so we have a decent crop.

Our dryland wheat is still green. The heads are moving into the milk and dough stage. In heavy rain years east of Clovis, dry farming doesn’t do well because there’s so much hardpan out here that the dark-red clay gets saturated. The plants get suffocated because there’s not enough oxygen. A lot of our crop on the east side got stunted because it had too much water. It’ll make a crop. It just won’t be as big of a crop as in past average-rainfall years.

Out on the west side by Cantua Creek where we also dryland farm, we have about 1,000 acres of barley. You need about 6 to 7 inches of rain to make a crop out there, and we got eight. We’re going to make a decent crop, which is great, because we make a crop on the west side one out of every five or six years.

We have an overabundance of feed this year. About six years ago, we started grazing large utility-scale solar projects. Solar companies hire us to manage vegetation. They can’t afford to have fires, so we come in with sheep and graze under the panels to remove the fire danger—and they pay us for it. We have sheep all over the state now in large solar projects. It’s been a big help to our business. It’s allowed us to expand, and we’re continuing to grow.