Not long ago, California dairy producer Ryan Junio prayed for rain. The ongoing water scarcity challenges that faced the Golden State was the No. 1 concern for this Tulare County dairy farmer.
“As a dairy producer, water scarcity is an ever-growing challenge and is my top concern,” Junio said last summer.
Junio wouldn’t have thought that nine months later he would be dealing with a different water crisis, as massive flooding has wreaked havoc on California’s largest dairy hub, Tulare County, home to 330,000-plus dairy cows. Recently Junio’s farm, Four J Jerseys, which consists of two dairies located in Pixley and home to 4,200 cows, had to evacuate one dairy that sits south of the Tule River.
“We have managed to keep the corrals dry, but we have water on three sides of us,” Junio said on Sunday afternoon. “With another storm coming, we are trying to be proactive and moved cows back to the home dairy in a safe area and took heifers to our heifer ranch, along with one of our neighbors.”
Relocating cows from their second dairy to the home dairy hasn’t been a small task.
“We turned nine 500-cow freestall pens into 600-cow freestall pens at the home dairy,” Junio explained. “The carrousel can handle it, but I had to switch my cows from 3x to 2x milking.”
Geoff Vanden Heuvel, the director of regulatory and economic affairs with the California Milk Producer Counci,l said flooding in Southern San Joaquin Valley has caused the evacuation of a small number of dairies with another dozen or so where the flooding could necessitate evacuation.
“We are really in the early stages of this situation,” he says. “Two of the flood control lakes, Success and Kaweah, are full which greatly reduces their ability to control the amount of water that gets released from them. If we have a rapid snow melt, the flows from those lakes could greatly increase the flooding which would threaten the dairies in those areas.”
Back in Pixley, Four J heifers were also relocated, spread out across their heifer ranch and nearby vacant corrals. They also pulled all the commodities out of their commodity barns, moving it to safe ground. However, Junio reports he still has alfalfa hay in that barn and 6,000 tons of silage at that dairy.
“We were proactive and got things moved before damage has been done to our facility,” Junio shares.
Their cropland is also not faring well.
“Several thousands of acres are under water as the river continues to overflow in restricted areas,” he says. “However, there are several other dairies up and down the stream from us in much worse shape.”
According to Junio, this is just the Tule River situation. South of their other facilities is Deer Creek and that has wreaked havoc as well for anyone along it.
Junio is thankful that his milk continues to be picked up and shares that his Land O’Lakes field representative told him that they are barely able to pick up milk from other farms.
“It is simply a mess,” he says. “I think all of us out west collectively prayed at the same time for water and it bit us in the rear.”
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