Vegetable farms take hit from state’s soggy winter
Floods ruined crops and equipment; spring planting delayed
Farms that fill Bay Area’s farmers’ markets and grocery stores with lettuce, kale, beets and carrots are still struggling to dig out from severe flooding during one of the wettest winters in years, with several more inches of rain expected this week.
When storm after storm breached levees and flooded fields outside Hollister (San Benito County) and other nearby locations in January and February, vegetable grower Happy Boy Farms lost an estimated $150,000 to $200,000 in crop sales, along with further losses on destroyed equipment and money spent on cleanup. It’s one of many produce farms in that area, around the Salinas Valley, that have had to delay planting because of continued rain, which is already causing nationwide produce gaps and high prices for products like lettuce, greens, strawberries, broccoli and cauliflower.
“Right now is when the production shifts from Arizona and Coachella and Mexico and transitions on certain items up to the Salinas Valley,” said Brenda Haught, president of Creekside Organics in Bakersfield, which distributes to Bay Area grocery stores, restaurants and wholesalers. The soil in the area is particularly heavy, so it retains a lot of moisture, making it physically impossible to do planting, she said, whereas farmers farther south in the Central Valley are not facing the same problems.
Just north of the Salinas Valley, about 20 to 25 farms with fields in the lowlying area around Hollister and Pacheco Creek are applying to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for flood relief, including Happy Boy Farms.
“I have both large farmers and small farmers that were impacted pretty significantly,” said Chris Keeler, district director of California’s USDA Farm Service Agency. “They’re going to have to remove debris and reshape and relevel the ground, and in some cases replace irrigation pipe.”
Keeler said a local committee of farmers has plans to request about $1 million in aid from the agency’s Emergency Conservation Program, which covers 75 percent of certain costs.
Based near Watsonville, Happy Boy Farms leases eight fields in neighboring counties. Four of those fields, or about a third of the farm’s 300 total acres, were hard hit, while others remain in production. Flooding wiped out crops, carried away small equipment and destroyed a tractor and motors that run pumps for its wells in two fields.
The farm has set up a Gofundme account that has raised over $18,000 of its $125,000 goal, some in the form of credit vouchers that customers can redeem for lettuce mix, bunched baby carrots and broccolini at its farmers’ markets starting in June, with a 10 percent bonus. In addition, several local restaurants, including Pizzaiolo, Nido and Chop Bar, all in Oakland, have organized fundraisers for the farm.
Beyond the damage itself, the farm has faced a typical problem in the region: It has yet to begin replanting its crops in the flood-damaged fields, because they have to dry up before tractors and other heavy equipment can come in.
“When there’s a major storm today, we see a major impact in six to eight weeks,” said Jennifer Lynne, who handles logistics at Happy Boy Farms. For example, big rain in early February means the farm isn’t able to plant then, leading to less produce to sell in April. Though winter is normally a light time for planting, this year was unprecedented in terms of overlapping storms.
The farm’s worst troubles began in January, when creek channels were blocked, causing a levee near Hollister to breach multiple times, which also forced some residents to evacuate.
“You get a lot of vegetation and debris and dead logs. It jams it up. When you get the kind of weather we got, it floods,” said Keeler.
Heavy rain of the kind Northern California experienced this winter can kill seedlings and rot mature crops. Wet vegetables are also more prone to mold and other damage.
During the first levee breach, Hugo Castro of Castro Farms in Hollister lost 12 acres of organic broccoli that he couldn’t sell, partly because of foodsafety issues from contamination with all the rainwater.
“That same week I was also going to harvest 2 acres of red beets, so I lost all of my production there,” he said. When the levee breached again, the deluge created huge holes, buried sprinkler pipes and left behind debris in a field where he was about to start planting. He estimates it will cost $65,000 to clean up and re-level the fields, which are currently unusable.
With the rain back this week, Lynne is anxious, though things are looking better than last month.
“The fields had a nice dry week last week so they dried out more, but the water table is still very high, so there’s not much room for the rain to soak in,” she said.
Spring is always a difficult time for farms, Lynne said. There aren’t as many sales yet, but there is a need to hire labor to prepare for the summer high season. Although the farm still has some produce to sell from its unaffected fields, it’s much lighter than usual.
“I always thought, ‘I wish we had all our fields in one place,’ ” said Lynne. “Now I’m glad we’re not.”