August 14, 2015
CapitalPress.com
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7
California
Fresh, processing tomato crops
good for growers with water
By TIM HEARDEN
Capital Press
REDDING, Calif. —
Fresh-market tomato growers
in Northern California say this
summer’s conditions have been
ripe for a good crop for those
who have enough water.
“Everything’s ripened early,
but it’s been a good crop with
good flavor,” said Aldon Burl-
ison, owner of Burlison’s Fruit
Stand in Dairyville, Calif.
He added the occasional
triple-digit heat has quickened
the development of his toma-
toes but hasn’t damaged the
crop.
“When it cools off, they slow
down,” Burlison said. “It’s been
kind of hit and miss. It gets hot
and then it gets cool again.”
For Orland, Calif., produce
farmer Ed Hughes, the season
has been a little rough because
the water he draws from his
wells is getting scarcer, he said.
“We’ve actually cut back
on the types of things I grow,”
Hughes said during a farmers’
market in Redding on Aug. 8.
But the season has been
agreeable for Tom Reemts,
owner of Tom’s Produce south
of Redding.
“It’s pretty good because I’ve
been growing these under shade
cloth,” Reemts said of his toma-
toes. “When it gets really hot,
they like being in the shade.”
The harvests of both
fresh-market and processing to-
matoes have been under way in
California for a little more than a
month. California leads the na-
tion in fresh tomato tonnage and
provides more than one-third
of the U.S. domestic supply,
although tonnage and acreage
were down last year, according
to the National Agricultural Sta-
tistics Service.
About 5,087.5 tons of
fresh-market tomatoes were
harvested from about 32,300
acres statewide in 2014, down
from 5,670 tons on 36,000 acres
in 2012, according to NASS’ an-
nual vegetable report.
Meanwhile, good growing
conditions so far this summer
have enabled the state’s process-
ing tomato farmers to keep up
with last year’s record pace, the
California Farm Bureau Federa-
Lacey Jarrell/For the Capital Press
Scott Scholer, field manager of Lassen Canyon Nursery in Mac-
doel, Calif., points out runners that will be cut off mother plants and
sold to strawberry growers across the United States.
Nursery specializes in
growing strawberry plants
By LACEY JARRELL
For the Capital Press
Tim Hearden/Capital Press
Pamela Spobo (right) and Jim Collins of Redding, Calif., pick out fresh tomatoes at a local farmers’
market Aug. 8. Tomato growers say it’s a good crop year for those who have water.
tion reports.
Tomato processors anticipate
contracts for 14.3 million tons in
2015, a 2 percent increase from
the final contracted production
last year, NASS reported.
The projected harvested
acreage of processing tomatoes
is 295,000 acres, about 2 percent
more than last year’s final total
of 289,000 productive acres,
according to NASS. As with
fresh-market tomatoes, much
of processing tomato growers’
success will hinge on the per-
formance of wells for those who
won’t have much or any surface
water.
This year’s $80-per-ton con-
tract price is second only to the
2014 price of $83 a ton, making
tomatoes a worthwhile crop for
farmers who have row-crop
ground and some water, the
Farm Bureau noted.
Perhaps bolstering tomato
crops have been breaks in the
heat. In the northern Sacramen-
SPI mostly unscathed as wildfires
rip through forest land, budgets
to Valley, temperatures reached
triple digits for three different
stretches in July but cooled off
into the 80s in between them, ac-
cording to the National Weather
Service.
MACDOEL, Calif. — Scott
Scholer has been in the straw-
berry business for 23 years.
He has stayed in it so long,
he says, because no two days
are the same.
“Agriculture is an adven-
ture,” Scholer laughed.
This year, Scholer, the gen-
eral manager of field produc-
tion at Lassen Canyon Nursery
in Macdoel, Calif., oversees
838 acres of strawberries. He
said each year strawberry acre-
age on the 5,000-acre Klamath
Basin farm varies based on
the number of orders made by
large-scale commercial fruit
growers, mainly in California.
“They plant them to make
berries. Our high elevation
nursery is the last step to the
fruit grower,” Scholer said.
Strawberry plants are not
grown for fruit at Lassen —
they are grown for runners
that are separated from mother
plants, developed by specialty
breeders, such as at the Univer-
sity of California or the Uni-
versity of Florida. Growing the
mother plants into suitable, sal-
able offspring is a process that
takes several years and spans
several locations.
“By the time these plants get
here to Macdoel, they are fourth
generation,” Scholer said.
Once in the ground at Las-
sen, the plants multiply “like
crazy.” He said rows spaced 3
feet apart are planted in March
or April, and by harvest time
in September, the plants are so
dense they look like a “green
carpet.”
“We plant 12,000 plants per
acre. We’ll harvest 300,000,”
Scholer said. “Last year we did
over 200 million plants out of
Macdoel.”
According to Scholer, Las-
sen is based in Northern Cali-
fornia’s Butte Valley because
the weather cools considerably
in early fall. He explained that
hardy nursery plants perform
best in the fruiting field if they
have a lot of chill prior to har-
vest.
“We hope for somewhere
about 250 hours of cold, which
is below 45 degrees from Sept.
1 to harvest time,” he said.
This year’s mild winter has
helped his crop get a head start,
but each season brings its own
surprises, Scholer said.
“Mother Nature can turn
around and tease you. One of
our big concerns is hail. If we
were to get a big hail storm,
at any time during the season,
it can be very detrimental be-
cause it cuts off the runners.”
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By TIM HEARDEN
Capital Press
ANDERSON, Calif. — As
wildfires have ripped through
thousands of acres of California
forest lands and depleted state
and federal firefighting bud-
gets, timber giant Sierra Pacific
Industry has gone mostly un-
scathed.
After losing major swaths of
land to fires in 2012 and 2013,
SPI has lost less than 1,000 acres
of its own timberland to fires
raging around the state, spokes-
man Mark Pawlicki said.
About 550 of those acres
were in the Lowell Fire, which
had burned more than 2,300
acres in Nevada and Placer
counties and was 95 percent
contained as of Aug. 6, accord-
ing to the state Department of
Forestry and Fire Protection.
With the company’s lands
mostly safe so far, Sierra Pa-
cific crews have been helping
Cal Fire battle nearby blazes by
providing maps, opening gates,
laying out the best locations for
firelines and giving water loca-
tions, Pawlicki said in an email.
“Also we are building a net-
work of fuel breaks across our
ownership and trying to tie them
into similar breaks on other
lands,” he said.
Government agencies can
use the help. As of Aug. 6,
wildfires had burned more than
22,000 acres in and near the
Shasta-Trinity National For-
est, more than 17,000 acres of
the Six Rivers National Forest,
nearly 5,000 acres around the
Modoc National Forest and
smaller portions of the Los Pa-
dres, Mendocino and Sequoia
national forests, according to the
U.S. Forest Service.
In all, about 10,000 firefight-
ers are battling 23 major blazes
in California, nearly one-third of
Tim Hearden/Capital Press
A California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection engine sits ready
at the Shasta District Fair grounds in Anderson, Calif., which is being
used as a base camp for firefighters battling blazes in Trinity County.
Sierra Pacific Industry crews have been helping Cal Fire fight wildfires.
whom are assigned to the more
than 100-square-mile Rocky
Fire in Lake, Colusa and Yolo
counties, The Associated Press
reported.
For the first time, the U.S.
Forest Service expects to spend
more than half its budget — 52
percent — on fire suppression
this year, further squeezing for-
est restoration, watershed and
landscape management pro-
grams, according to an agency
report issued Aug. 5.
In fiscal 1995, the agency
only spent 16 percent of its bud-
get on firefighting, the report
explained. But within 10 years,
fire expenditures could take up
as much as two-thirds of the
budget, the agency contends.
Meanwhile, Cal Fire esti-
mates it has spent $63 million
battling large wildfires since
July 1 — a sizable chunk of the
$434 million it spent in the entire
last fiscal year, the AP reported.
For Sierra Pacific, this year
so far marks a bit of a reprieve
after the company lost about
17,000 acres of timberland in
the 30,000-acre Ponderosa Fire
in Northern California in 2012
and saw another 12,000 acres
of its property burn in the 2013
Rim Fire near Yosemite Nation-
al Park.
“We have been lucky so far”
this summer, Pawlicki said.
A few years ago, Sierra Pa-
cific developed a 100-point
checklist of safety precautions
that must be taken at each log-
ging site, going above and be-
yond what state regulators re-
quire, research and monitoring
manager Cajun James said ear-
lier this year.
As part of the company’s
protocol, weather-station read-
ings feed a password-protected
website that logging contrac-
tors must check to know ahead
of time whether conditions are
too dry or windy to work, James
said.
Timber can’t be insured,
so SPI salvages the trees left
standing after a fire on its
property. The bark protects the
wood inside, so trees can still
produce lumber even though
they’ve been killed. Company
crews also take steps to mini-
mize soil erosion, Pawlicki has
said.
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33-4/#5