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Central Valley Agricultural Intelligence

November 2026 Field Report

Published November 2, 2026 • For November planning & operations

♦ STRONGEST EL NIÑO EVER RECORDED ♦ WATER BOARD ADOPTS THE BAY-DELTA PLAN ♦ FIRST WATER ALLOCATION LANDS DEC 1 ♦ WALNUT CROP DOWN 16% TO 680,000 TONS ♦ DORMANT SPUR SAMPLING OPENS ♦ CITRUS FROST PREP ♦ WHEAT PLANTING WINDOW OPEN ♦ SPOTLIGHT: PREMIUM 97 & KMI ZEOLITE ♦ VETERANS DAY, 108 YEARS

All Field Reports

Time-Sensitive: The Ground Closes This Month

November is the pass. December is the mud.

This is no longer a forecast about a strong El Niño. It is now the strongest El Niño ever recorded, on almost any measure, and it is still building: the weekly Niño index hit +3.3°C against a previous record of +2.1°C, with the peak expected between late November and January. Statewide odds of a wetter-than-average winter run above 90%, and the odds of a record-wet season are roughly 20 times the normal background rate. November itself still reads near average. The weight lands December through March.

So here is the practical read: this month is the last one you can count on getting a rig across the ground. Sampling, gypsum, compost, banded potassium, pre-plant phosphorus, wheat in the drill. All of it wants to happen now, not after the first real storm. We are running the fall route through the end of the month.

Schedule Your Soil Sampling

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Section 1

Crop Status & Field Work

October was the last feeding month. November is the last working month, and that is a different list. The jobs that pay this month are the ones that need iron on dry dirt: sanitation, banded potassium, gypsum, compost, wheat in the ground, and a soil test that tells you what to buy before the spring rush prices it. Everything on this page is scheduled against one deadline, and the deadline is the first storm that shuts the ground down.

🍐 Almonds

Dormancy · Sanitation Window

Sanitation is the highest-return job on the place this month, and it is a counting job before it is a shaking job. UC's mummy thresholds are tight: no more than 0.2 nuts per tree in the central and southern San Joaquin, about one mummy per five trees, and fewer than two per tree up north. Evaluate 20 trees a block, off the tree before bud swell, ground destroyed by March 1. November is when you count and book the work, not February. Dormant spur sampling opens mid-month too, and it is a separate sample from the mummy count. See the dormant block below. Band potassium while the ground is still dry enough to travel.

🌿 Pistachios

Short Crop · Going Dormant

A light year is behind you and the only thing you can still do about 2027 is get potassium placed. More than 90% of a pistachio's K uptake happens during nut fill, so a November band is a soil-building placement, not an uptake application. Be careful with foliars here: boron and zinc are immobile in pistachio, so a fall spray is not carried into the buds the way it is in almond. UC puts both in spring. The one exception stays zinc sulfate on young trees to help them defoliate.

🪓 Walnuts

Crop Down 16%

The number landed and it is smaller than anyone wanted to hear: 680,000 tons, down 16%. Nut set fell 18.1%, from 972 to 796 per tree, and Tulare took the worst of it at 25%. See the Market Brief, because a short crop is not all bad news. In the orchard: no nitrogen, full stop. Potassium is the opposite and this is its month, soil-applied so winter rain carries it down. Prune Botryosphaeria wood only into a dry forecast.

🍇 Wine & Table Grapes

Leaf Fall · Pruning Decisions

The post-harvest nutrition window has closed in most Valley blocks. It only pays with healthy leaf area and more than about three weeks to leaf fall, and after one of the earliest harvests in decades you are past that. What is still live is the pruning calendar, and it is a disease decision as much as a crop-load one: Eutypa and Botryosphaeria infect through fresh cuts in wet weather, so later pruning into dry stretches beats early pruning into a storm. On furrow and flood ground, dormant potassium goes on now.

🥝 Kiwis

Harvest Finishing

The pick wraps in the first half of the month and the cold chain is still the whole game. Fruit wants to be down to 32 to 40°F inside 12 to 24 hours; a warm bin overnight costs storage life you never get back. Gray mold is decided in the shed, not the field. Once the fruit is off, vine nutrition opens up: potassium replacement sized off your own yield and tissue history, because there is no UC California guideline to lean on here.

🍊 Citrus

Harvest Begins · Frost Prep

Navels are coloring and picking starts, into a bigger crop: USDA put the forecast at 84 million cartons, up 5%, with mandarins at 38 million. More fruit into a market that already saw navel prices lag last spring. The job that cannot wait is frost readiness, and in a record El Niño year the risk profile is not the usual one. Full detail in the frost block below. Nitrogen stays off. Next year's program starts in February.

🍀 Pomegranates

Harvest Complete

Wonderful is off and the ground is open, so this is the sampling month. Potassium goes severely deficient in sandy loam and gets worse with depth, which is exactly where a sample earns its keep, and there is no published UC post-harvest K rate for pomegranate, so the program has to be built off your own numbers. Worth remembering for the 2027 budget: the UC-funded trial on mature trees found no yield gain above about 100 lb N/ac. If you have been pushing nitrogen on poms, that is money on the table.

🌿 Cotton

Picking · Plowdown Deadlines

Harvest expanded through late October around scattered showers and modules are moving to the gins. Prices are the good news: the 7-market average ran 74.10¢ the week ending October 30, about 13¢ above a year ago, with San Joaquin spot near 71¢ on light supplies. Behind the picker, two things: nematode counts read truest between harvest and plowdown, and plowdown deadlines are set by district. Confirm yours with the County Ag Commissioner, then rip at least 18 inches before the profile saturates.

🌽 Corn (Silage & Grain)

Cover Crop · Last Call

Cover crop seed has to be down in the first half of the month. By December the soil is too cold for consistent germination, and bare dairy ground going into a wet January is the easiest nitrogen you will ever lose. The silage potassium drain is the quiet one: whole-plant removal runs 280 to 365 lb K₂O/ac against 37 to 52 for grain, which is how rented, manure-light ground runs down without anyone noticing. Test residual nitrate before a pound of 2027 gets written.

🌾 Wheat & Open Ground

Plant Now

This is the planting month, and the price is still carrying the argument. The September all-wheat price came in at $6.30 a bushel, $1.54 above a year earlier, off the smallest hard red winter crop since 1957/58. In the drill: phosphorus is the one nutrient that belongs in now, banded at planting, because it does not leach. Keep starter N near the seed to 25 to 30 lb, two inches to the side and two below. Gypsum and any lime go on ahead of the rain so they have time to react.

Opens This Month

Dormant sampling: the sample decides the spray, not the calendar

The dormant spur sample is the one piece of pest work that has a hard open date, and it is mid-November through the end of January. One sample a year. It is also a different sample from the mummy count, so do not let one stand in for the other.

How UC sizes it: 35 to 50 trees per block, 2 or 3 spurs clipped from inside the canopy on each, then 20 spurs read for scale and mites. Mite eggs need 40 or more spurs before the number means anything. Scab is read on first-year twigs instead, 20 to 40 of them. Count San Jose scale and European fruit lecanium separately; adding them together is the most common way a block gets sprayed for nothing.

What the numbers buy you. San Jose scale under 20% of spurs infested is a no-spray. From 20 to 60% it is oil at 6 to 8 gallons an acre. Above 60% it is oil plus an insect growth regulator. Lecanium and overwintering mite eggs are both no-spray under 20% and oil only at or above it. Scab turns at 10%, where it becomes copper plus oil, or chlorothalonil plus oil. In a lot of blocks the honest answer the sample gives back is nothing at all, and that is the cheapest pass you will skip all winter.

Two cautions for this winter in particular. Oil works best at delayed dormant or on a warmer day, when the eggs are actually respiring, so a cold snap is the wrong morning to go. And with this forecast, timing is a water-quality question as much as an efficacy one: put anything dormant on into a dry window with room behind it, not ahead of a storm. One more note worth knowing if your scale is already being worked by parasites: go lighter in season and pick the softer material, because the free control is worth more than the spray. Oil alone does not hold European red mite in Kern County.

Citrus: Get Ready Before You Need It

Frost protection, and why a wet winter changes the math

The thresholds are not the same for every block you farm. Mandarins start taking damage near 32°F held about two hours. Navels are tougher: they will take roughly 28°F for about four hours before you need to be protecting them. That gap is why a mandarin block and a navel block on the same ranch are two different decisions on the same night, and why mandarin growers ran machines 8 to 10 hours last New Year's while navels ran zero to five.

What the machines actually do. There are about 16,300 wind machines in the Central Valley and they cost somewhere near $30 an hour to run. With a decent inversion overhead they buy about 3 to 5°F in the grove. Without an inversion they buy very little, which is the part worth understanding before you are paying for hours you did not need. Service them now, check the thermometers and the alarms now, and know which blocks you would start first.

The wet-winter wrinkle. A cloudy, storm-driven pattern means fewer of the clear, calm, dry nights that make a radiation freeze, so on balance a record El Niño should mean fewer frost events, not more. The catch is that the clearing behind a front is exactly when you get one, and a grower who stood down for the season because the forecast said wet is the one who gets caught. Stay on the county frost alerts all winter.

One thing in your favor this year: wet, firm ground stores heat during the day and gives it back overnight, while dry or freshly cultivated soil does not. In a normal year we are telling growers to irrigate ahead of a freeze to get that. This year the rain is likely to do it for you. Fruit carrying good sugar also has some frost resistance of its own, so a block that has had time to mature is in better shape than one you are pushing early.

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Section 2

November Fertilizer Program

November is a placement month, not a feeding month. Almost nothing on this list is about uptake this season: it is about getting the nutrient physically where the root will be in March, while the ground is still firm enough to carry a rig. Potassium banded into the wetted zone and phosphorus banded at wheat planting are the two that genuinely belong in now. Gypsum and compost belong in now for a different reason: they need the winter to work. Nitrogen is a stop decision everywhere except a tillering wheat topdress that is still four months out, and with a record El Niño on the forecast, any available N sitting on bare ground is a loss waiting to be measured.

Crop

Primary Nutrients

Micros & Notes

Timing & Method

Almonds

Band dry K in the wetted zone at 200–250 lb K₂O/ac on microirrigated ground. UC data show four years of broadcast K moved only 6 inches down while banded reached two feet. Replacement runs 85–100 lb K₂O per 1,000 lb kernels. No nitrogen. The post-harvest N window shut with leaf activity.

Foliar boron and zinc are both finished for the fall; a spray onto inactive leaves is money spent on nothing. Read hull boron off this season's samples and book the spring program now. MED The real November line item is sanitation, and it is a pest decision with a nutrition-sized budget.

Band K through the month while the ground carries equipment. Mummy count by block now, shaking booked before bud swell.

Pistachios

A light year does not call for a nitrogen rescue. Band K in the wetted zone as a placement for 2027; deficient blocks carry 100–200 lb K₂O/ac above replacement. Nothing else goes on a tree heading into dormancy.

Boron and zinc are immobile in pistachio, so a fall foliar is not remobilized into the buds. UC puts both in spring, off this year's leaf report. LOW Zinc sulfate on young trees, 1–6 years, to aid defoliation is the one exception.

Band K before the ground softens. Sample now and build the spring foliar order off the numbers.

Walnuts

No nitrogen. UC is blunt: walnut N uptake is over by late summer, and fall N not taken up before senescence leaches out. Potassium is the fall job, soil-applied now so winter rain carries it into the root zone. Leaf K at or under 0.9% supports up to 400 lb potassium sulfate/ac.

Add 40–50 lb K₂O/ac if hulls leave the field: hulls carry 35–40 lb K per ton and that is a real export nobody budgets. HIGH Zinc and boron are spring foliars in walnut. Heavy late zinc sulfate defoliates, which is the wrong tool in a bearing block.

Soil-apply K ahead of the first storms. Hold pruning for a dry window to keep Botryosphaeria out of the cuts.

Grapes

Post-harvest N and K have closed out for the season in most blocks: they only pay with intact canopy and more than three weeks to leaf fall. On furrow and flood ground, dormant-season K is the correct timing and that window is open now. On drip, K belongs in-season before veraison, so it waits.

Fall foliar boron was October's play and is past. MED Read this year's petiole numbers against the stage they were pulled at, because the critical ranges fall from bloom to harvest. Zinc is a pre-bloom spray, not a dormant one.

Dormant K after leaf fall on furrow ground. Prune into dry forecasts, later rather than earlier.

Kiwis

Nothing until the fruit is off. Once it is, potassium replacement sized off your own yield and tissue record. UC's program puts the whole annual nitrogen budget into March through July on bearing vines, so N is closed until spring.

Straight talk: there is no UC California fertilization guideline for kiwifruit, no published state K rate and no leaf critical values. Anyone quoting you one is quoting somebody else's country. MED

After the pick, on whatever functional leaf is left. Keep Phytophthora-prone sets under six hours.

Citrus

Nitrogen stays off. Late N buys thicker rinds, poorer color, less juice and frost-tender flush going into the coldest eight weeks of the year. Next year's program starts February or March. Soil K on light soils can still go on ahead of the rain; light soils respond better than heavy.

The leaf-sampling window closed mid-October, so this month is about reading results, not pulling samples. A low zinc or manganese number is an order for a spring spray. HIGH Foliar iron does not work; fix drainage instead.

Plan off results. Keep soil moist ahead of a radiation freeze: wet ground stores and releases heat, dry ground does not.

Pomegranates

Potassium replacement now that the fruit is off, based on removal and your own trend. Do not push nitrogen: the UC-funded trial compared half, full and one-and-a-half rates and found no yield improvement above roughly 100 lb N/ac, most of it applied by mid-June.

Potassium goes severely deficient in sandy loam and worsens with depth, so sample by depth, not just surface. There is no published UC post-harvest K rate for pomegranate; this program is built from your own numbers. MED

Sample now, fertigate post-harvest while the system is still running, prune in the dormant window.

Cotton

Fertility season closed months ago and nothing goes on this crop. The work now is what you learn from it and what you do to the profile before the rain.

No foliar micros. LOW The fall work is diagnostic: harvest to plowdown is the only window that reads nematode pressure against the crop you just grew, and it sets up winter ripping. Plowdown deadlines are district-specific.

Sample behind the picker, before plowdown. Rip at least 18 inches deep while the ground is still dry enough to shatter.

Corn / Dairy Ground

No more N this season. Credit what is already out there before you write a pound into 2027: UC Davis puts first-year mineralization of organic N at 40–50% for lagoon water, 20–30% for sludge, slurry and corral manure, and 0–10% for finished compost. Ammonium and nitrate count at full value immediately.

Watch the silage potassium drain on rented ground. HIGH Timing is the risk: 40–70% of a year's mineralization happens in the first four to eight weeks, so available N spread on bare ground ahead of a record-wet January is the easiest loss on the farm.

Soil nitrate test before anything is applied. Cover crop down in the first half of November. The State Water Board's new dairy order was adopted September 16 and the Regional Board rewrites the discharge requirements from here, so confirm what applies to you.

Wheat / Open Ground

Phosphorus is the nutrient that belongs in the ground this month, banded at planting, which is the most efficient placement there is on low-P soils. Hold nitrogen back: UC says wheat does not generally need more than 40–60 lb N/ac before spring, and the topdress at tillering does the real work.

Starter has a hard salt limit: keep N near the seed to 25–30 lb N/ac, two inches to the side and two below. Gypsum, lime and sulfur all get decided off the test. HIGH Gypsum does not change pH; it is a calcium and sodium tool.

Amend and plant this month, topdress at tillering. Nitrate to two feet, each foot read separately.

Salts and gypsum: this is the year the winter actually shows up to help. UC is clear that reclamation leaching works best in winter, when evaporation and transpiration are at their lowest, and the practical lever is to wet the profile before a rain event. A bone-dry profile absorbs the storm. A pre-wetted one lets it push salts down past the roots. With December through February forecast above average, a late-November irrigation set is a salinity decision, not just a refill, and it is the cheapest leaching water you will buy all year. Two things worth repeating. First, gypsum is for sodium, not for pH; it will not move soil pH in either direction and using it to chase acidity is wasted money. Second, on rate: a full gypsum requirement can run 4 to 12 tons an acre, but UC's own finding is that supplying 40–75% of it should produce marked improvement. High-SAR ground with relatively low salinity is the most responsive. High-salinity ground that is not sodic needs leaching water, not amendment. If the dormant season is your only pass, use a coarse material so it does not dissolve and run off in the first storm. Almonds are on UC's salt-sensitive list, pistachio and cotton are tolerant, and marginal water shows up in the almonds first.

Input Cost Note: We still will not quote you a price. What you actually pay swings hard by product, volume, delivery point and supplier, and a number in a newsletter is worth less than a real quote. Direction is worth knowing, and the direction has not turned. Every one of the eight major nutrients the trade tracks is above where it sat a year ago. Anhydrous leads that list by a wide margin, urea is the next furthest ahead, and UAN, phosphate and potash are all higher year over year. Within the last month the solution nitrogens did the moving: UAN28 was the one significant jump, UAN32 and potash edged up, anhydrous and the phosphates ticked higher, and urea was the only one that slipped at all, and only barely. The summer softness in nitrogen is over and has been for two months. The sulfur story from last month has not gone away either, and it still matters more here than the headline nitrogen numbers do: sulfuric acid is what DAP and MAP are made with, so phosphate is being carried up by a cost on the supply side rather than by demand, and everything sulfur-based on your amendment list is priced against the same shortage. Elemental sulfur, ammonium sulfate, sulfate of potash, and gypsum freight in some markets. Diesel is its own line: California is running well above the national average and above last year, which shows up in every custom application bill in the Valley, and we track it weekly in the Energy Update. What to do with that: if a fall soil test turns up a phosphorus or sulfur correction, get it quoted now rather than in the spring rush, and let the test tell you whether you need it at all. On sodium problems specifically, gypsum is usually the cheaper calcium than elemental sulfur right now, and it works immediately instead of waiting on microbial oxidation.

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Section 3

November Market Brief

Every figure below carries its source and date. Where no defensible published number exists, and the 2026 pistachio crop is still the clearest example, we give you supply and volume context instead of inventing one. Confirm every price with your handler or broker before you act on it.

Almonds

232 M lb

September shipments

↑ Up 17.9%, exports up 28% on Indian demand. Receipts to date 1.22 B lb.

Pistachios

Under 1 B lb

2026 crop, trade view

↓ Against a 1.6 B lb record in 2025. Bloom heat cut set. Tight supply supports price.

Walnuts

680,000 t

USDA OM · 2026

↓ Down 16% from 809,000. Nut set off 18.1%. See the lead card below.

Wine Grapes

$333.73

per ton · Dist. 13, 2025

↓ Last final figure. 2026 preliminary crush does not publish until February.

Navels

84.0 M

cartons · 2026/27

↑ Up 5%, mandarins 38 M. Harvest starting into a market that already lagged.

Cotton

74.10¢

per lb · 7-mkt, Oct 30

↑ About 13¢ above a year ago. San Joaquin spot closed near 71¢ on light supply.

California Milk

$20.40

per cwt · September

Flat year over year, and a full 90¢ over the $19.50 U.S. all-milk. Best margin position in the West.

Alfalfa

$241

per ton · prem/supreme

September 5-state total. All-hay averaged $188. Western drought is still pulling winter buying forward.

Lead Commodity: November

Walnuts: a short crop is not the same thing as a bad year

680,000 tons USDA Objective Measurement • down 16% from 809,000 in 2025

The tonnage nobody had last month is on the table now, and it is light. USDA measured 1,498 trees in 749 orchards between July 20 and August 29 and found average nut set down 18.1%, from 972 nuts per tree to 796. By variety it was uneven in a way that will decide whose year this is: Tulare fell 25.0% and Chandler 19.4%, while Howard gave up only 2.3%. LandIQ's October 1 count also put almost 3,900 hectares of standing orchard in the abandoned column, which tells you the acreage correction the industry has been talking about for three years is actually happening on the ground.

Here is the part worth sitting with. California has spent several seasons with too many walnuts chasing too few buyers, and the fix was always going to be fewer pounds. The industry went into this harvest having shipped past 100% of what it took in last year, so carry-in was already clean, and now the new crop comes in 129,000 tons lighter than the one before it. That is the first genuinely tight supply picture walnut growers have had in years. It does not undo three hard seasons, and if your block is Tulare you are looking at a quarter less to sell against it, but the direction is finally the right one.

What we would do: do not let a light crop become a light program. The temptation after a short year is to trim inputs, and potassium is the wrong place to find the savings, because fall is the only correct timing for it and a tree that went short this year is drawing on reserves for next. Get leaf and soil numbers in hand, put the K on while the ground will still carry a spreader, and skip the nitrogen entirely. If the hulls left the field, add the 40 to 50 lb K₂O/ac that went with them. On a 16% smaller crop, the cheapest ton you will produce in 2027 is the one that comes from reserves you did not let run down.

Water & Weather

The strongest El Niño on record, and a real number on December 1

Where we stand. Statewide major reservoirs went into the new water year at 107% of average for the date, which is a strong starting position by any measure. The caveat is Oroville, the State Water Project's own big reservoir, sitting at 85% of average and 48% of capacity, and most of the state finished the water year in the 80 to 120% band for precipitation with a dry pocket in the north-central Sierra.

What is coming, and it is no longer a maybe. This El Niño is now the strongest on record by almost any metric, not a forecast of one. The weekly Niño index reached +3.3°C against a prior record of +2.1°C, the warm water has pushed further east than any event on file, and peak intensity is still ahead, expected between late November and January and most likely in December. Statewide odds of a wetter-than-average winter are above 90%, the odds of an extremely wet winter run about five times background, and the odds of a record-wet season about 20 times background. The chance of a dry winter is down around 5 to 10%. Timing still matters more than the headline: the storm-track signal barely shows in November, then December through March carries it, with January and February the most likely to go extreme. The state is not waiting: a statewide emergency was proclaimed September 21, and DWR has 4.4 million sandbags and 400,000 tons of rock staged at 68 locations with all 1,600 miles of State Plan levees inspected.

The catch nobody should skip past: wet does not automatically mean snow. This event is warm, and warm storms drop rain instead of building snowpack at low and middle elevations. Above roughly 7,000 to 8,000 feet the snow should be fine. Below it, a lot of this water is going to arrive as runoff on a schedule you do not control rather than as a snowpack that melts out when you need it in June. That is the single most important distinction between a wet winter and a good water year, and it is the reason recharge capacity matters more this year than the precipitation total does.

The date to put on the wall. The initial State Water Project allocation is announced December 1, with the CVP number following in late February. Starting from reservoirs above average with a record El Niño on the forecast argues for a materially better year than 2026's 45% SWP and 28% south-of-Delta CVP ag number. It is still a forecast, not water, and 2026 is the reminder of what that distinction costs: reservoirs were full in May and the snowpack was at 12%. Rain that falls instead of stacking up as snow leaves on someone else's schedule. If your district has recharge capacity, that is the number to be watching, and the practical point on your own ground has not changed: a wet January means the work gets done in November.

Regulatory Watch

Three decisions that landed while harvest had your attention

1. The Water Board adopted the Bay-Delta Plan update on October 29. This is the big one. It resets the terms for how much river water cities and farms can divert so that more reaches the Delta, and it is built as two pathways: agencies that sign on to restore river habitat under the Healthy Rivers and Landscapes approach step out from under the strictest flow requirements, and agencies that do not get the regulatory version. Nothing about this changes your water this season. What it changes is that your district's choice of pathway is now the thing that decides your water in the years after, which makes the next few district board meetings worth your time in a way they usually are not. Expect litigation: tribes, Delta groups and C-WIN have all said they will challenge it, and Metropolitan said the plan did not go far enough on the voluntary side. A court can slow this down, so treat the adopted plan as direction of travel, not settled law.

2. The dairy order is adopted and the rewrite is now at the Regional Board. The State Water Board signed off September 16, and the Central Valley Regional Board writes the actual discharge requirements from here. For anyone applying lagoon water or manure, the practical point is that the requirement you will be held to is still being drafted, so this is the window to be in the conversation rather than reading the result. Confirm with your own Regional Board contact what applies to your facility, because this varies by operation and nobody should be taking a newsletter's word for it.

3. Merced subbasin got an “incomplete” on its groundwater plan. DWR's five-year review flagged unresolved subsidence and sent a letter October 8, which starts a 180-day clock for the subbasin's three agencies to fix the deficiencies. Incomplete is one step above inadequate, and inadequate is what sends a plan to the Water Board and into probation, with fees and reporting attached. If you farm in Merced, that is a timeline worth watching. If you farm anywhere else under SGMA, it is a preview of how the five-year reviews are going to go, and subsidence is the item doing the damage.

Market Note: Every figure here is indicative and carries the date and source it came from. Prices move daily and vary by district, grade, contract and delivery point. Confirm with your handler or broker before you make a marketing decision. This newsletter is informational and is not financial advice.

🔬

Section 4

Spotlight: Premium 97 & Zeolite

Two products this month, and the record El Niño is the reason they belong on the page together. A winter this wet does two opposite things to your ground. It hands you the best leaching water you will ever get, and it carries off everything you have not held onto. Premium 97 is how you put that water to work. KMI Zeolite is how you keep it from taking your nutrients with it. One is the pass you make before the rain. The other is the reason the rain costs you less.

Diamond K Gypsum

Premium 97™
Solution Grade Gypsum

Calcium sulfate dihydrate, OMRI Listed

Analysis

22.5% Ca · 18% S

97% CaSO₄·2H₂O

Best Window

Now, pre-rain

The purest and most soluble mined solution grade gypsum we can get, and the reason it matters this month is sodium. Calcium is what lets a sodic profile actually drain, and a winter this wet is only free leaching water if the water can get through.

✓ 18% sulfate sulfur, already plant-available, in a record sulfur year

✓ Lower rates than bulk: some western sources need up to 4x more product

✓ Ground for solutionizing equipment: fertigation, drip, micro-jet

✓ Does not move pH. It is a calcium and sodium tool, not a lime substitute

✓ OMRI Listed · 50 lb bags or 2,000 lb totes

! Fix water pH to 6.5 to 7.0 before the gypsum goes in, not after, and use an acid-form phosphate if you are tank mixing one

KMI Zeolite

Zeolite
Water & Nutrient Manager

Mined clinoptilolite, 30-US mesh, OMRI Listed

Cation Exchange

1.6–2.0 meq/g

97%+ clinoptilolite

Best Window

Before the rain

A mined mineral that works like a sponge with a charge on it. The exchange sites hold ammonium, potassium and water in the root zone instead of letting them run past it, which is the whole problem with a record-wet winter on coarse ground.

✓ Best fit is sandy and fast-draining ground, where leaching is the loss

✓ Stable from pH 3.0 to 10.0, so it works on any Valley soil we test

✓ 30-US mesh, 90% under 0.595 mm, median near 80 mesh

✓ It does not wear out. This is a mineral, not an input you re-buy annually

✓ OMRI Listed · CDFA certified · GRAS

! It holds nutrients, it does not supply them. Zeolite is not a fertilizer and will not replace a pound of anything on your program

What You Are Solving

Premium 97

Zeolite

The job it does

Supplies calcium so a sodic profile will let water through, and sulfur while it is there

Adds exchange capacity, so what you already applied stays in the root zone

Why now specifically

Winter rain is the leaching water. Applied after the storms start, it has missed the event it was supposed to work with

It has to be in the profile before the leaching happens. Incorporated in spring it does nothing about this winter

Sulfur at a record

Carries 18% sulfate sulfur already in the available form, no waiting on oxidation the way elemental sulfur does

Not a sulfur source. Its contribution is making the sulfur and nitrogen you did buy last longer

Which ground wants it

High-SAR ground with relatively low salinity is the most responsive. High salinity that is not sodic needs water, not amendment

Sand and coarse textures, low organic matter, and blocks where fertilizer efficiency is the complaint

How long it lasts

It is consumed. Gypsum is an annual or periodic line item sized off your SAR

It stays. A mineral with a stable crystal structure, so it is a capital improvement to the soil, not a yearly buy

Certified organic blocks

OMRI Listed

OMRI Listed, CDFA certified, and GRAS

Running them together

They solve opposite halves of the same winter. Gypsum gets the water moving down through the profile; zeolite makes sure that moving water does not take the nutrients with it. On sandy, sodium-affected ground with a wet forecast, that is a genuinely complementary pair rather than a bundle. Call us and we will size both off what your soil report and water analysis actually show.

One honest caveat before you buy either one. Neither of these is a reason to skip the soil test; they are both answers to a question the test asks. Premium 97 is the right call when your SAR says sodium is what is stopping water from moving, and if your ground is not sodic you do not need it, however wet the winter gets. Zeolite earns its keep fastest on sand, on low organic matter, and on blocks where you already suspect you are feeding the water table. On heavy ground that holds everything anyway, it is a slower payback and we will tell you so. One more time, because it is the most common misunderstanding about zeolite: it holds nutrients, it does not supply them. Nothing comes off your fertilizer budget because you spread it. We would rather sell you one of these than both.

The other half of fall is the paperwork. If you are carrying an awarded soil grant, the practice has to go in, the sampling has to be defensible, and the amendments have to come from a source the program will actually accept. Those are three different problems and we handle all three.

Already Awarded a Soil Grant?

We pull the samples, run the lab work, and source the amendments your award requires.

Getting selected was the good news. What follows is three different problems: baseline samples pulled to program protocol, results from a lab the program will accept, and compost and amendments from certified providers that match what your award calls for, documented well enough to survive a reviewer. We do all three. November is the month to get the practice in the ground, because a documented application and a defensible date are far easier to produce from dry ground than from a muddy February.

On “certified” compost, the marks are not interchangeable and the programs generally gate on a carbon-to-nitrogen lab analysis, a permitted facility, and the paperwork. We know which of our sources carry which, and we will not hand you a load that cannot be documented. One thing to ask for that is on nobody's requirement list: salinity and chloride on the compost analysis. Not a program gate, and the failure mode that shows up in a Valley almond block two seasons later. We ask for it on every load.

And a straight answer on compost. It is a soil-building and water-holding decision, not a nitrogen substitute. UC's working figure for first-year availability from a typical finished material is around 10% of the organic nitrogen, which pencils to roughly 11 lb of available N per acre from a 4-ton application. That is why fall is the right time to apply it, and why it does not come off next spring's nitrogen budget. Raw manure is a different animal: incorporate it promptly or you volatilize the ammonium you were counting on.

Last Call on the Fall Route

Tell us which blocks you want covered. We will build the route, pull the cores, run the lab work, and walk you through what it means, including which amendments the numbers actually justify and which ones you can skip this year. The calendar between now and the first real storm is the whole window, and it is most of the way full.

GPS Soil Sampling Water Testing Custom Blends Compost Supply Fertigation Planning

Call (559) 816-3889

Email Bryan

This Month in American History

November 11, 1918: The Eleventh Hour, 108 Years On

One hundred eight years ago this month, the guns stopped. The armistice was signed in a railway carriage in a French forest before dawn and took effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Men who had spent four years underground climbed out into a silence most of them had stopped expecting to hear.

America kept the date. Congress made Armistice Day a legal holiday in 1938, and in 1954, with another generation of veterans home from a second world war and a third from Korea, it was renamed Veterans Day and widened to honor everyone who had served, in any war and in none.

The Valley has always paid that bill. Farm towns sent their sons in 1917 and again in 1942, and the ones who came back went straight into a tractor seat. There are families on this ground farming land a grandfather bought with service pay, on a loan a government made good on because he had earned it. That is not a parade story. That is a deed in a filing cabinet, and most of the people reading this know exactly where theirs is.

“

To us in America the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service, and with gratitude for the victory.

President Woodrow Wilson
Armistice Day message, November 11, 1919

⚒

Army

✈

Air & Space

⚓

Navy & Marines

🚒

Fire & Rescue

🚔

Law Enforcement

🚑

EMS & Medical

To the Men & Women of Our Armed Forces and First Responders

This is your month, and one day of it is not enough. Some of you are reading this from a tractor seat and some from a base a long way from home. Some of you will spend Veterans Day on a county road at two in the morning or on the wrong end of a levee when the river comes up in January. We farm in freedom because you stand in its defense.

You are the reason we are Safe and Free.

The Archive

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Every issue we have ever published is free at bmelloag.com/reports: field conditions, ag crime, markets, fuel and fishing.

This one comes straight from the field: shakers back in the almonds for mummies, drills running behind the discs on open ground from Chowchilla to Corcoran, and the first navels starting to color up around Orange Cove. The ground is still letting us work, and that will not last the month. We’d rather you hear it from someone who shares your sunrises, your sunsets, and the long day in between. That’s the promise behind every B Mello Field Report.

Proudly American · Rooted in the American Dream

Bryan Mello

B Mello Ag Services · Central Valley, California

B Mello Ag Services · Central Valley, CA

November 2026 Edition · Published November 2, 2026

(559) 816-3889

bryan@bmelloag.com

bmelloag.com

This newsletter is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Crop conditions, market prices, program deadlines and fertilizer recommendations vary by location, variety, soil and season. Always consult a licensed PCA or CCA, the current CDFA program documents, and your commodity broker before making agronomic, regulatory or marketing decisions. B Mello Ag Services assumes no liability for decisions made based on this publication.

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