Weather patterns are highly variable across the state of California. They change from year to year and across locations. While parts of the state may be experiencing drought conditions this year (Figure 1), each location can have dramatically different weather. For growers and agronomists, location-specific weather information is essential to understand plant growth and water use. It is also important for planning field management activities such as fertilization and irrigation.

We have created a new interactive website where users can access their location-specific precipitation and temperature data:

Seeding rate is an important consideration for small grain growers at planting. There are a number of agronomic factors that help to determine the ideal seeding rate such as whether a field will be irrigated, the potential for weed pressure or lodging, the planting date, crop type, and seed germinability. In addition, there can be a large range of seed weights among different small grain varieties and from one seed lot to the next. To achieve full yield potential under irrigated conditions in California, 25 to 30 plants per square foot is a good target density for wheat. As a seeding rate this translates to approximately 1.2 million seeds per acre with a seed weight of 40 gram per thousand seeds. However, adjustments to the seeding...

As the fall planting season begins, we'd like to share recently developed case studies detailing N management actions and crop productivity outcomes in several small grain fields during the 2019-20 growing season. Growers from different parts of the state worked with UC Cooperative Extension to implement N-rich reference zones in their fields. The N-rich reference zone is a relatively small area within a field where extra N fertilizer is added at the beginning of the season. This extra fertilizer ensures that the reference zone is not N-limited between planting and the time when an in-season fertilizer decision is made. When a grower is...

California's craft brewing industry is continuing to expand its market presence in the state. However, only a small percentage of malting barley used in California is grown within its borders. The primary bottleneck in the supply is the lack of malting facilities. Currently California is malting roughly 900 tons annually, the majority of which is done by one malt house in Alameda, with some of the barley grown in northern California shipped out of state for malting. The industry has grown somewhat in the last few years with the addition of several small malting facilities. For comparative purposes, California produces 3.7 million barrels of craft beer annually, the equivalent of around 120,000 tons of barley.

California...