Freeze recovery proves gradual for some farmers
Area market owners say their vendors are just now returning after vegetables, flowers, bees and other produce fell victim
Farmers markets in Pasadena and the Bay Area are gradually returning to normal levels of vendor participation after February’s winter freeze struck a blow to produce, citrus and flower producers.
The storm’s effects on the the Bay Area Farmers Market resulted in nearly half of the usual vendors missing for weeks, said Pam Beito, co-owner and co-founder of the market, held Sundays at Baybrook Mall in Friendswood.
“The severity of it could have been worse if (the freeze) had lasted longer, with the loss of electricity making it worse,” she said.
Beito said the March market was without many regulars, with vendors having to sit out while they dealt with short- and longterm effects of the freeze that began Feb. 14.
At Silver Sycamore’s monthly farmers market in Pasadena, owner Jackie Spigener told a similar story.
Spigener said the freeze caused many of her regular vendors to scale down inventory in March while others have had to sit out completely. An April 18 event will be a hybrid with produce, crafts, baked goods and other food items, she said.
“There were some farmers that lost everything,” Spigener said.
Frank Schmitt and Brenda De Leon own the Mushroom Factory, a vendor at the Bay Area market. They said the freeze claimed two chickens and froze several duck eggs and power outages caused them to lose most of their mushrooms.
Even though the mushrooms were being grown indoors, they died when the room temperature dropped to the 30s.
One small-scale farmer based in Santa Fe missed a few markets after he lost what had been ready for harvest before the freeze.
“He worked in the cold to harvest everything he could,” Beito said. “He missed two or three weeks until he had enough to harvest.”
Another farmer, Constant Ngouala, from Plant It Forward, a nonprofit group that provides property to African refugees with a farming background so they have a place to grow produce to sell at farmers markets, didn’t make a return to the Bay Area market until nearly two months after the freeze.
“Plant It Forward was definitely affected both by what they lost that was growing, but they also lost their irrigation system,” Beito said.
The group had to rely on sales from community subscriptions, where customers pre-order boxes of seasonal produce either weekly or monthly.
One flower grower, Rodney Griffin from 6G Heritage Farm, took every precaution he could before the storm — covering plants, placing Christmas lights along his beds for warmth. But he still lost much of his product when some types of flowers succumbed to the cold. Other cold-weather flowers, however, thrived.
Joe Winter of Winter Family Farms said the freeze cost him 140 citrus trees that had taken 12 years to develop. But his losses were minimal by comparison to other farmers, he said, because he had prepared his crops for several days before the storm by covering them and running irrigation non-stop through a backup generator when power was lost.
Beito cited a cattle rancher that came out of the freeze without losing any livestock but was left with one survivor out of a litter of piglets to nurse back to health.
With harvest season just getting into full swing, Beito and Spigener expect local farmers to recover and recoup.
As a beekeeper who, with her husband, produces and sells her own honey, Beito estimates she lost 30 percent of her hives. For independent farmers and businesses, she said, even temporary disruptions are significant.
“For most of the Bay Area farmers, the setback was not as significant, but at the same time, anything that affects small businesses is significant because we’re doing what we love,” she said. “For some people, it’s a side gig, for others, it’s our livelihood.”