Successful Year

Our tenant has just wrapped up a year full of exceptional costs which were more than balanced by good crop yields. The near-record heat, combined with the unusually high insect pressure, caused him to spend more money on water and insecticides than ever before. Despite the generally poor cotton yields experienced by most cotton growers in the San Joaquin Valley this past year, our tenant's Acala cotton yielded 1537 pounds per acre and the Pima cotton yielded 1512 pounds per acre. Although the price for Acala cotton remains depressed, Pima will probably be even more valuable than it was last year.

Our tenant places his cotton in sales pools operated by Queensland Cotton. Last year's final total for Pima cotton was $1.35 per pound. Because of the rain damage to our tenant's Pima cotton, he ended up with only $1.05 per pound. This year's total price should be higher, and our tenant's cotton, both the Acala and the Pima, was picked before it suffered any rain damage at all. The Acala cotton price should end up somewhere between $.72 and $.75 per pound.

Clear Weather Allows Wheat Planting and Field Work

This autumn's lack of rainfall allowed our tenant to plant wheat on a third of the land, his usual practice. He was also able to get all his field work done on next year's cotton land before the rains finally started on December 18.

GPS Tractor Guidance

As suggested in September's Farmland News, our tenant purchased a GPS tractor guidance system for his old John Deere 4430 tractor. He chose the simplest and least expensive option, a system made by Trimble that only provides information to the driver, who must interpret that information and steer the tractor manually. While this system is not nearly as user-friendly as a GPS system that actually steers the tractor itself, it does improve the efficiency and ease of doing tillage work. It is not nearly accurate enough to be used for listing, planting, or cultivating.

Trimble GPS Antenna Mounted on Tractor Roof

Trimble GPS console Mounted on Tractor Windshield

Rent Increase

Due to the outstanding financial results from this year's farming, our rent is once again increasing. As usual, we have no idea how our tenant does this calculation, nor how it might come out next year.

Robert Sturgeon
Publisher, Editor, Reporter, Ace Photographer, Newsroom Flunky, Webmaster
rsturge@inreach.com
http://www.vistech.net/users/rsturge

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