(Copyright)
The WALTHER REPORT
By Tony Walther
Those young bankers were right the day they came out to see my beef project. They suggested that what I really should be doing was raising vegetables, operating a kind of truck farm, as they used to say.
My half-hearted goal at the time was to be a cattle rancher and I didn’t care for their attitude.
There I was with my cowboy hat, T-shirt, jeans and boots, with my three head of cattle, and these two young guys in their suits were trying to tell me, a Future Farmers of America member and high school agriculture student, what I really should be doing.
Now don’t misunderstand. I had nothing against vegetables. In fact, I enjoyed vegetable gardening, I just never had the full appreciation of its potential, or maybe I was just mesmerized with thoughts of the days of the old west and vast expanses of cattle range and how grand it would be to ride around on horseback to check out my spread.
But here’s the deal. I was trying to get this beef thing going on a little less than three acres, most of which was planted in young almond trees, several of which were dying off from some mysterious disease. There was a dry creek bed in the back. Actually it all started when I got a free pig, but we’ll get back to that later.
All of this was just off of Highway 99E in the northern Sacramento Valley of California. This stretch of road runs through orchard country, primarily walnuts, prunes (that’s what Californian’s call the type of plums that are dried into prunes), almonds, and some peaches. The orchards are grown in a fairly narrow band along the Sacramento River, in some of the richest soil in the world.
On such high value ground it only makes sense to raise high value crops, such as the orchards are. Probably, if there weren’t orchards to grow, it would be planted to high-dollar vegetable crops.
As you go away from the river and into the foothills, the ground is less fertile, and there is little to no irrigation available. That’s cattle country.
Now at the time, the mid 1960s, there was at least one established produce stand on the highway near us with several acres behind it devoted to various vegetable crops, and I am sure they sold local fruit and nuts as well.
But here I was on this just shy of three-acres plot, excellent soil, and irrigated from the mutual water company (kind of like an irrigation district). What would have made sense, would have been to devote it to raising produce (what trees were still alive were not so big that they would shade everything out). In fact, we (my dad and I) did raise some garden there.
The acreage was near the highway, so it would have been easy to draw in local customers as well as those traveling through. Actually, I think I (we) considered such a thing, and then figured, naaa.
At a later time, maybe five or more years, when I was working for the local newspaper, a retired executive from, I don’t know, the Bay Area or LA, bought some property down the road and created a successful fruit stand and vegetable farm business. Some of the established orchardists in the area were jealous of him.
And in more recent years, several more fruit stands have opened up, spurred on by a renewed interest in locally grown and sometimes organically grown food.
I might add, even when I was in high school, I was somewhat interested in the organic thing.
Oh, by the way, those bankers who came out were judging projects for some type of competition and I received an award. I have a suspicion it was one of those everyone is a winner things.
Is there a point in all of this? You must be wondering by now. Well, yes there is. It’s about economics and the principles of business.
What I should have been learning in all of this, was how business works. But the tradition of 4-Hers and FFAers showing and selling livestock at junior livestock auctions runs deep, even in orchard country.
It’s really a silly thing. The young person raises a single animal, feeding it expensive store-bought feed and then sells it at some astronomical price, way above the real world market. What has been learned?
But it’s kind of hard to parade around your ear of corn or crate full of squash or your almond tree in the show ring. And it’s just not as glamorous.
Actually, I never did take part in a junior livestock auction. I once had several pigs that were destined for one, but, wouldn’t you know it? They were overweight. They did taste good, though – sorry little piggies.
I also had two beef steers rejected at two different junior livestock auctions. They didn’t make the grade, so they were shipped off to the real world slaughter market, then at Stockton, Ca. Now that was a real lesson in real world economics. Cattle have to be raised on relatively cheap land with economical feed.
One lesson I failed to learn was make use of any advantage you get, but also remember, if others are not doing it, there may be a reason.
I was the recipient of what was then called a Sears Project. For absolutely no cost, I was given a Berkshire gilt (a little girl pig). The only payment I would owe would be a female from her first litter.
She grew into a sow (a large female pig) and after a visit to the boar (a male pig) at the school farm, she produced a litter (hey, another lesson – the facts of life).
I was on my way to being one heck of a hog farmer. Trouble is, in my neck of the woods, hogs had gone out of style (although once popular). The neighbors didn’t cotton to the idea of living next to Tony’s Hog Farm.
That’s where the almost three acres came into the picture.
I did try to figure out the economics of the thing, how I could obtain relatively cheap feed. And I did get some, to include: cull walnuts, cull peaches, a small amount of bad milk from a local dairy (and don’t ask me to explain the health ramifications of that one), and some spoiled feed from a feed grain mill that I boiled in a big incinerator like container. But there was not enough, and in order to get pigs looking like they need to for a junior show, you really have to buy that expensive pelletized stuff.
So, without going any further with all of this, it did not work out. Sold the sow after she became pregnant with her next litter (swine gestation is three months, three weeks, and three days). The buyer, a ranch kid from up in the northeastern California mountains, got a good deal. As soon as they got home, the sow had her litter (I guess it was the long trip that induced labor).
Yeah, I think I should have raised vegetables.
My wife just left for the local farmers market a few minutes ago.
Postscript:
Even though I didn’t go into ranching, farming, or commercial vegetable growing, I did earn much of my living through agriculture for many years. I spent maybe four years putting out what was called the Farm Page for two different newspapers, and I spent a decade hauling produce over the road.
