From the Fields: Max Francesconi, Sacramento County farmer

By Max Francesconi
Sacramento County farmer

We finished planting corn silage, which we supply to dairies, about six weeks to two months ago. It hasn’t tassled out yet. It’s about 4 feet high, and it’s looking good with the spring we had and the early summer. 

There were not a ton of cherries, but the quality ended up pretty high with the mild spring and without very much rain. The market was very good, and the price was pretty high. We had a pretty good year, but there were definitely some blocks that weren’t as heavy as years past. We were the exception; we definitely had a lot more cherries than most other growers. 

Walnuts look good. This comes back to the mild spring. It looks like it has a pretty good crop on it. Disease pressure has not been horrible. 

We have winegrapes, but we do not have any contract, so we are doing our best to keep expenses down. We made minor adjustments to save a bit of money but still keep up the quality. You still have to do your preventative maintenance and keep it growing and keep high-quality grapes on the vine so you could market them towards the end of the year. We definitely applied more sulfur to prevent mildew. Doing this helps us delay our first synthetic spray. Instead of doing a spray at the end of June to now, we added sulfur for a little longer to delay the cost. We’re still spraying but being more economical with it.

We finished harvesting wheat for grain. It’s for rotation, so we can break up the ground and not keep it fallow. Yield was just average, nothing exceptional. The price was not good. Would we have planted it if we knew what the price was towards the end? Who knows. But it’s still good for the ground to have it in there. 

In those (wheat) fields, we just finished planting yellow beans. With this weather, we’ll see how the heat comes, but the beans should pop up pretty fast.