The sun was shining again lately when he visited what used to be 90 acres of high Ventura County strawberry fields.
He refocused to a 40- bottom storehouse vessel that Santa Clara River floodwaters had swept off a neighboring ranch and deposited before him. Capsized tractors and toxin lockers were bestrew about like toys, while the deep channels between crop rows were filled with slush. A harvesting machine was damaged beyond form. Essence pipes, hoses and trash littered the ranch’s outskirts.
“It’s a total loss,” he said. Velasquez, a supervisor at Santa Clara Farms in Ventura, estimates that the expense of cleaning up and replacing damaged crops, machinery and equipment could run upwardof $900,000. In the meantime, 150 of his employees would be out of work for weeks.
Throughout California, farms that have struggled to cope with years of severe drought have now been dealt additional misery by a series of deadly atmospheric rivers that have devastated operations, even while helping to fill dwindling reservoirs. In many cases, the losses are being felt most sharply by the thousands of farmworkers who have suddenly found themselves unemployed or working fewer hours in dangerous conditions while also dealing with damage to their own homes and vehicles.
The flooding is just the rearmost in a continuing series of environmental heads that have affected farmworkers in recent times, including laboring in extreme heat, gobbling dangerous campfire bank or losing work due to failure. Last time, roughly,000 agrarian jobs were lost when California’s irrigated cropland shrank by,000 acres, or nearly 10.