From the Fields - Grant Chaffin

By Grant Chaffin, Riverside County farmer

We are in the heat of lots of plantings. We’re in the seventh cutting of our alfalfa, so the production season is coming to an end. We typically get eight or nine cuttings per year.

Demand is uncharacteristically strong. Supply is extraordinarily limited, and the price just continues to go up. The flipside of that is we saw a little bit of relief in the form of some of our expenses. Diesel prices started to drop, but they’re coming back up. Nitrogen fertilizer started to drop, and it’s coming back up. Phosphorous fertilizer stayed pretty consistent at a high level. Historically, it was $300 a ton for nitrogen sources, and now I’m paying $900 to $1,000 per ton. Our margins continue to get cut by our increasingly high expenses.

We’re starting to plant alfalfa and are about a week into our alfalfa plantings. We just finished planting baby potatoes, which are sold in assorted packages of whites, yellows and purples. We’ll be planting wheat Dec. 1. We’re getting fields prepped and ready and pre-irrigated for our dehydrated onion program, so we’ll probably start planting onions the first week of November.

It’s just preparations. You’re either getting ready to plant, planting or getting ready to harvest or harvesting. It’s such a brisk rotation, and the growing season is so long here. There really is no down time. You’re constantly transitioning from one crop to the next.

The water availability is the big unknown. We are fallowing 25% of our acreage, and that number is going up to 35% in August of 2023. I’m proud of our community in our long-term acknowledgment of a water crisis on the Colorado River. We have been making contributions to that for the last 18 years. Long before there was a cry of shortage, we (irrigators that rely on Colorado River water) had already acknowledged it, and we were participating to try and offer some type of relief.