In a muddy field in Watsonville, farmer Peter Navarro showed off rows of strawberry plants that are starting to bear fruit and look healthy. The trouble, he said, is that this is what these plants should have looked like in March — not the beginning of May.
“It's a good month, maybe five weeks, even up to six weeks behind,” Navarro said.
This year’s historic winter storms and floods, followed by unusually cold weather, set back crops throughout the region.
“I think everyone realizes at this point that the spring crop is probably not going to happen,” said Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau. “It's probably going to be a summer crop for most of those fields.”
In an area that relies on steady income from agriculture, the effects of the delay ripple from farmers to farm workers, and into the broader economy. Officials are still tallying the damage from the last wave of winter storms in March, but Groot said that in Monterey County alone, roughly 10% of acreage was affected.
“It's not a total impact,” he said, “but it is a pretty significant impact, particularly to strawberries.”
Navarro said his crop had started to rebound in April as things dried out. But May's unseasonable rain hit just as some berries were finally ready for harvest. On Navarro’s farm are piles of big, juicy strawberries — the kind Watsonville is famous for — that he cannot sell because of the surface damage the May rains caused.
“We have to walk through the field, and any ripe fruit is basically not going to make it to market,” he said. “We just go in and clean our fields, so we basically just dump the fruit.”
But beyond that, there is little to do for the roughly 300 people he normally employs. In a normal season, his fields would be full of ripe strawberries, and full of workers harvesting them.
“We'd be going at a decent pace right now,” he said.
In addition to the loss of work for his employees, Navarro is not collecting the revenue he normally would during the spring harvest. That affects his business decisions well beyond this season.
“We still have this year's investment that we have not recouped a penny on. And you have to think about the following year,” he said. "It really makes you nervous.”
Federal disaster assistance is available for farmers, but most of it is geared toward operations that lost acreage due to flooding. For them, the U.S. Department of Agriculture will cover up to 75% of the cost of land restoration, up to $500,000.
But for farmers who did not lose cropland, like Navarro, the main assistance vehicle is low-interest loans, currently at an interest rate of 3.75%. He worries about taking on more debt when there is no money coming in.
“If you’re taking a loan to pay a loan, it's kind of spinning your wheels,” he said.
He could plant fewer acres in the fall to save on input costs, but that means less revenue next spring. Or he could plant more in the fall to try and make up for this year’s shortfall, but that could be risky with forecasters calling for a potentially wet El Niño winter.
“All of this makes you really sit down and think how you're going to move forward,” he said.
The issues also have an impact beyond this region.
California produces 90% of the nation’s strawberry supply. Normally, strawberry season rolls through the state like a wave. As it peaks in southern growing areas like Ventura, growers in the north pick it up. This year, the normal pattern is off, with roughly 5% of California’s strawberry acreage destroyed in the March storms, according to the California Strawberry Commission.
As a result, the industry is trying to regroup.
“For some growers, it's honestly just a matter of time,” said commission spokesman Jeff Cardinale. “But in the industry, time is usually not on your side.”
Fortunately, he said, roughly 95% of the state's strawberry acreage remains viable, which means supplies — and prices — are stable at a key point in the season.
“The way that the industry is set up here in California is there will always be California strawberries available,” he said. “It's just a matter of the amount.”
Farmers like Peter Navarro pride themselves on being eternal optimists. But he admits this year is putting that optimism to the test.
