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Friday, March 8, 2019 CapitalPress.com 7 Smaller winter garbanzo crop grown for canning in California By PADMA NAGAPPAN For the Capital Press It is a relatively small vol- ume crop, grown on about 10,000 acres in California, but garbanzo beans are still significant because the vari- ety grown is the large, cream colored bean used by the canning industry. Dry bean researchers with the University of Cal- ifornia’s Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources released two new studies last year on the cost of growing garbanzo and the returns it yields. Rachael Freeman Long is an agron- omy adviser with UCANR who has been working with beans for 30 years. The production manual she worked on for two years was published recently, and will benefit both new and existing growers by showing them how to better manage UCANR A field of garbanzo dry beans in Yolo County, Calif. production, she said. The report has tables on nutri- ent management, and shows how much phosphorous and nitrogen to apply, among other guidelines. “We grow the really large ones for canning,” Long said. “Most of the beans grown elsewhere are used for flour, but we can’t do it because water is really expensive to irrigate gar- banzos. Places like Wash- ington state grow 100,000 acres of garbanzos but they get free rainfall so they don’t have to irrigate. We have to, so found a niche market that makes a little bit more money.” Garbanzo is a winter crop for California, which gets enough rainfall to germi- nate the crop so there is less need for irrigation. Nitrogen is added to the soil so grow- ers don’t have to fertilize as much. She explained that garbanzo is not as strong as soybeans as a nitrogen fixer, so growers do need to add some nitrogen to get a good yield. “We are doing trials on how to manage weeds in garbanzo. You plant in win- ter, and harvest in the sum- mer and it’s difficult since you have to control both winter and summer weeds,” Long said. “There are no herbicides registered for garbanzo, so once the crop emerges from the soil you can’t spray. Her- bicides can be used soon after planting, and that’s what growers do, but they don’t hold real well all the way to summer, so we have a couple trials going on now.” The typical growing sea- son is from December to May. It’s not a crop that can be planted back to back, so farmers have to rotate crops once they harvest to control pests and diseases. Wheat is the usual rota- tion crop for the fall, or some growers opt to wait a year and switch to tomatoes in the following spring. “It’s one crop per year, you can’t double crop gar- banzo,” Long said. “In the meantime, you work out the soil compaction, because equipment going over it can make soil hard and com- pacted, making it hard for roots to grow. So tillage will break it up.” After harvesting with a combine, discing and till- ing follows to prepare the soil for the next year. Gar- banzo is not as huge a crop as almonds in the state, but it fetches a better price than wheat and requires fewer inputs than other crops. S19-4/106