Our 2022 Harvest has been completed. This growing season brought about a lot of reminders that we work in agriculture and our barley is at the mercy, and benefit, of mother nature.
Wet Fall/Winter
Planting for Winter Barley takes place in the fall. The barley has to be in the fields over winter and those often get covered in water (especially in our valley). Due to where it is planted, a wet fall and winter made our Oregon plan need to shift. Instead of Oregon Wintmalt, we’ll be looking at Oregon Francin, which we were able to get in the ground for our spring planting.
Our Winter varieties in Washington were able to get into the ground on time, so we did have a great harvest for both Wintmalt and Talisman from our Skagit growers.
Snow Geese
Skagit-grown Talisman, also a winter variety, dealt with flooded fields and those fields that weren’t under 3+ feet of water became food for our good friends, snow geese.
One of our farmers lets hunters bird hunt on his fields to help keep geese and ducks from eating all of the grain. On one weekend he had a group heading to a field, the directions he gave included “look for the green field, you can’t miss it.” When the hunters got to what was supposed to be a green field, they saw no green and called back. Our grower couldn’t believe that the snow geese had come through and eaten the entire field down to the ground.
Lucky for us, that barley sprung back up and had a great yield once we harvested it! Turns out: Snow Geese poop is great fertilizer!
Wet Spring
A Wet spring can create two main concerns for our growers - they can’t get into the fields as early as they’d like to plant the spring varieties and there is an increased chance of smut, which would ruin the crop. Unlucky for us, we had both happen this year. We were eventually able to get grain in the ground, which allowed us to get our core barley variety, Pilot, on most acres for our regular growers. Fritz was also planted, but our 2022 crop was plagued with smut and was not deemed malt quality.
Seed Shortage
One of the things that we pride ourselves on is the wide variety of grains we offer our customers; these provide new flavors and interesting functionality. This year we had our eye on a few varieties that ended up falling through due to war in Ukraine, seed shortages worldwide, and some varietal rights getting bought up. Instead of a large variety this year, we do have quality.
The Good News
The good news and main takeaway from this harvest is - our grain quality is the best we’ve seen since 2015. The yields for our growers were outstanding (around 4 tons/acre) and the overall quality was remarkable. Dormancy typically breaks in January, so the new barley crop will come into production after that, based on the needs of the malthouse. We’re excited and can’t wait to taste the first few batches of Crop Year 2022.
