Vineyards could suffer from low rainfall, high temps

These unnaturally warm days, when morning fog hangs above dormant vineyards and blue-sky afternoons turn balmy, may delight the senses but they increasingly worry farmers.

The North Coast needs some big storms this winter to avoid a drought that would dry out pastures and reduce the yield of grapes and other crops, farm officials said.

“It looks dire,” said Tony Linegar, assistant agricultural commissioner in Mendocino County. “Everybody is extremely concerned about the lack of rain.”

Already some ranchers are hauling water to their beef or dairy cattle in the rural lands west of Petaluma, said Lex McCorvey, executive director of the Sonoma County Farm Bureau.

The warm weather also raises the prospect that green buds will swell and open on grape vines a few weeks earlier this year, possibly in February rather than March.

Should that happen, growers will need to protect those emerging buds even earlier from freezing temperatures.

“You can’t expose a vineyard to frost or you lose pretty much everything,” said Mark Greenspan, a viticulture consultant with Advanced Viticulture in Windsor.

In a dry year, temperatures tend to dip below freezing on more nights, growers said. And since sprinklers are the most common method of frost protection, water gets used for protection that otherwised could be saved for irrigation.

Many farmers already have struggled through two dry years that have resulted in increased debt, reduced revenue and greater feed and irrigation costs. At a time when the nation’s economy is sputtering, a third dry year “is very likely to send a lot of people out of business,” McCorvey said.

Santa Rosa has received just 7 inches of rain this season, about half the average by mid-January. And the National Weather Services is predicting dry and warm weather through at least next Wednesday.

Deborah Curle, master gardener coordinator for the UC cooperative extension in Santa Rosa, said her office has fielded few calls from residential gardeners worried how the unusually warm weather will affect their plants. Her main advice is for gardeners to remember two more months of winter remain so they should refrain from fertilizing or other activities better undertaken in spring.

Many farmers remain optimistic that enough rain will arrive soon. On average Santa Rosa receives more than 10 inches of precipitation in February and March, about a third of the seasonal total.

Alexander Valley grape grower Jim Murphy summed up his calmness by saying that farmers learn to cope with Mother Nature. “What she gives us we’ll take,” Murphy said.

But the region’s farm officials say the water levels of many farm ponds are dangerously low, and each passing week without rain raises concern that the soil will dry out too soon this spring.

“The rangeland is not doing well,” said Steve Hajik, Lake County’s agricultural commissioner.

Several growers said they will be able to adjust to an earlier bud break.

What it would mean this season is “10 more days of having to sleep in our pickups and watch the thermometer,” said Pete Opatz, a viticulturist with Vino Farms, which operates vineyards spread from Cloverdale to the Carneros region in southern Sonoma County.

Murphy, who farms about 270 acres of grapes, said a dry winter and spring could cause growers to reduce some of the fruit from the vines.

“Some won’t make it to harvest,” he said.