Farmers struggling to pick, ship harvest
Fires hit in San Mateo County at summer’s peak
Small farms on the San Mateo County coast, including those with popular farm stands along Highway 1 like Swanton Berry Farm and Pie Ranch, have narrowly escaped destruction from the CZU Lightning Complex fires. But with roads still closed off, those farmers now face a different challenge: figuring out how to harvest what’s still growing abundantly in their fields — and transport it out of fire evacuation zones to farmers’ markets and donation sites.
“It’s super stressful every day that we can’t harvest and do work on the farm this time of year,” said Ryan Casey of Blue House Farm, where workers were evacuated a week ago and have not been able to return. “It’s a lot of money being lost during an already stressful and trying year.”
Firefighters made progress over the weekend on the CZU Lightning Complex blazes, which have grown to 78,000 acres in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, claiming one life and forcing 77,000 people to evacuate. Farmers were allowed back into the evacuation zone to check on crops and animals, but they can’t leave, or they won’t be able to return to continue working. In many cases, farms are dealing with infrastructure destroyed in the fire and are working without electricity, right at the peak of summer harvest.
“Help us get back on our feet,” read the Instagram post of Brisa de Año Nuevo, a produce and flower farm near Pie Ranch. Though its fields weren’t damaged, it lost thousands of dollars worth of greenhouses, irrigation systems and other tools in the fire and is currently
without power. “Without electricity, we cannot power our homes, power our cooler and sprinkler systems, or even access the water in our well.”
At Swanton Berry near Davenport, a unionized organic strawberry and produce farm known for its two farm stands on Highway 1, the fire burned right outside the boundary and singed rows of green beans. It also burned down a home that founder Jim Cochran built 45 years ago and had been renting out (but fortunately was empty at the time of the fire).
Meanwhile, the farm missed out on a week of peak harvest. Pounds and pounds of blackberries and strawberries went bad in the fields, and so far, the farm’s lost $30,000 in income.
“Strawberries you need to harvest exactly when they’re ready. If you wait one day you might be OK. Two days they’re gone,” said Cochran on Monday, when the air quality had gotten much better due to wind from the Pacific Ocean.
Blue House Farm, which farms 80 acres in Pescadero and nearby San Gregorio, had 35 workers displaced in the evacuation. That leaves no one to harvest and also means those workers have lost access to both housing and jobs, said farm owner Ryan Casey.
Neither ranch was damaged in the fire, but being stuck behind the evacuation zone results in thousands of dollars a day in lost income and wasted vegetables and fruit, Casey said.
“We’re really putting pressure on Cal Fire and the county to create some sort of permits for workers to be able to get to work,” he said.
But even if workers are available — at Swanton Berry, eight workers are camped out at Cochran’s home — farms in evacuation zones need to find workarounds to actually get food out. Swanton Berry Farm drove a truck full of green beans, sugar snap peas, English peas and strawberries to the border of the evacuation zone, unloaded it, and had someone load it back into a truck on the other side of the police border in time for Sunday’s Menlo Park Farmers Market.
Pie Ranch, a nonprofit educational farm in Pescadero that lost its historic farmhouse in the fire, is dealing with the same access problem, but it also lacks labor for the harvest. The issue isn’t so much getting produce to market but getting it to those who need food because they are unemployed during the pandemic or were displaced by the fire.
Cofounder Jered Lawson, who said they’re still reeling from the loss of an 1863 farmhouse they used for offices and staff housing, said they need to do something with the produce — including heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, potatoes and red Gravenstein apples that are ready to harvest.
“There’s a lot of crops that need to come out,” said Lawson. It may already have the structure in place: The farm recently spearheaded a federally funded initiative called a Farm Fresh Food Relief Program, hosting a collection site for fresh produce from all over the region, which got boxed up and sent to community organizations fighting hunger during the coronavirus crisis.
Now, Lawson is in talks with Off the Grid, which organizes street food markets around the Bay Area, to get that same produce from nearby farms to food trucks. The idea is to bring the trucks to the fire region to feed first responders and those displaced by the fire.
“We’re trying to figure out how we can do more Farm Fresh Food Relief to respond to this new crisis,” he said.