Farmers bear the brunt of California’s flooding
CLEMENTS — When the water receded, and Bill Berryhill was finally able to drive to the farthest corner of his vineyard, he was stunned by what he saw.
The levee along questionably named Dry Creek had burst open, leaving a 50-foot chasm through which water flooded most of his 400-acre ranch north of Clements. Branches, logs and other debris were caught on the trellises and strewn among the rows like mounds of driftwood on a beach.
Worse than the water or the wood, and what surprised Berryhill so much, were the tons of sediment and sand that had been dumped across the half-dozen acres closest to the levee breach. The mud partially buried thousands of vines up to 5 feet deep, swallowing their grafts.
The plants could not be saved. Berryhill says he stands to lose a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of chardonnay grapes over the next five years, not to mention the cost of cleaning up and repairing the levee.
“I felt like crying. I felt like pulling my hair out,” the longtime farmer and former state assemblyman said Friday, as an excavator scooped up the vines and dumped them into towering piles to be burned. “You don’t know what to do. You sit there thinking, ‘This is a disaster.’”
It’s far too early to say how much damage the floods have caused for agriculture across San Joaquin County and the region, but an untold number of farmers likely have dismaying stories not unlike Berryhill’s. Some are still waiting for the waters to subside before they can even take stock of potential losses. And the threat of additional flooding may remain for months to come in areas near snow-fed rivers.
A wide variety of crops are at risk, from open fields of sod or dry beans, to cherry orchards or other stone fruits.
“Standing water is an enemy of agriculture,” said Tim Pelican, the county’s agricultural commissioner. “Plants don’t like it.”
Some of the damage may come in the form of reduced profits, since farmers who cannot get their fields ready for planting soon enough may be forced to switch to lower-value crops, he said. And some almond growers have been unable to get bees into their orchards for pollination.
In cases like these, Pelican said, the damages won’t be known until harvest time.
His office has estimated a $6.5 million loss countywide from the January storms alone. “But that’s nowhere near where it’s going to be at the end of the year,” Pelican told county supervisors last week.
And officials haven’t even begun to tally all of the orchard trees that toppled during the windy storms.
A couple of massive riparian oaks may be to blame for Berryhill’s woes. The trees fell across Dry Creek at some point, causing water to pool up almost like a beaver dam, the farmer said. That likely increased pressure on the unimproved levee upstream until it gave way.
Now his employees will spend months cleaning up a debris field which, as if things weren’t bad enough, is teeming with rattlesnakes displaced by the flood.
“I’ve seen one rattlesnake in 17 years on that ranch,” Berryhill said. Ten have been found in recent weeks.
Berryhill doesn’t have crop insurance for this vineyard. He probably wouldn’t qualify for a payment anyway, he said, because he’ll still be able to harvest a crop from the vast majority of his ranch.
And that saving grace is what helps him keep things in perspective.
“You take the good with the bad. Or the really bad,” he said. “I feel real blessed to even have this ranch. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”