Drenchings Take a Toll on Variety of Crops : Prices are up and quality is down for such produce as broccoli, celery and strawberries. Rough seas have hampered fishermen.

“Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the Earth; without rain, there would be no life.”

--John Updike

The fierceness of the recent storms was a stark reminder that the generative power of rain is relative. Mother Nature sometimes dispenses this life-giving source in lethal doses.

Nobody is more acutely aware of this than the farmer. Several local crops--including broccoli, celery and strawberries--were either decimated or heavily damaged by the recent drenchings. One need only attend a local farmers’ market to get some idea of the lasting ill effects on growers.

Product quality and selection in some cases are still suffering. And prices remain a bit inflated, according to managers from Ventura County’s six farmers’ markets.

“We got hit by the rains so badly that it’s disrupting current production and future production,” said Karen Wetzel, manager of Ventura County Certified Farmers’ Markets, with outlets in Ventura (Wednesday and Saturday) and Thousand Oaks (Thursday).

Crop losses also prevented many area growers--including some from Central California--from attending markets in Oxnard, Camarillo and Ojai.

Farmer absence was highest and product quality lowest during the January floods, but it will be quite some time before the bazaars return to normal.

Some growers were unable to enter their muddy fields to sow springtime crops, Wetzel said. Up to three-week delays for such veggies as carrots, cauliflower and some lettuces can be expected.

But enough of the gloom. There is a rainbow on the horizon. “A lot of the stone fruits--such as apricots, cherries, peaches--will be coming in a couple weeks early this year,” Wetzel said.

Why? Despite the overabundance of precipitation, the unrelenting storm fronts were generally on the warm side. With a break from consistently cold weather, the trees now have a jump-start on fruit production, Wetzel said.

*

Local fishermen--and the area seafood outlets that depend on their fresh catches--are also making a slow recovery from stormy weather.

“It’s killing us,” said Joe Carabajal, manager of Otani Izzy fish market in Oxnard, which relies heavily on locally caught fish. “It’s really affecting us because nobody will go out.”

Rough seas since mid-December have frequently hampered fishermen from harvesting the waters around the Channel Islands and beyond. “We’re getting a load here and there--that’s about it,” Carabajal said.

As a result, seafood outlets have no choice but to stock their cases with fish purchased from other sources. For consumers, this may mean a bump in prices. For instance, red snapper purchased wholesale by a market directly from the fisherman might cost $1.50 per pound. Through a broker, Carabajal said, the price would be $2.40 per pound to the market and a corresponding increase to the consumer.

Mayra Sutton--whose fisherman husband, Bill, helps stock the family’s Seafresh Seafood market in Ojai--said there’s more to contend with than just roiling seas.

“A lot of that stuff that washes down the Ventura River,” she said, “ends up in the ocean.” Like trees and other debris, which pose serious hazards to fishermen.

The problems have greatly limited local supplies of California halibut, shark and rockfish, Sutton said.

Optimism, though, is prevailing for some in the local fishing community, Sutton said. Fishermen are setting their sights on midsummer, when an abundant swordfish catch is predicted. Plus, with the warm-water El Nino current, incidental catches of some exotic species--such as Pacific barracuda, normally found in Mexican waters--are expected to show up in area fish cases.

But the local fishing industry, Sutton said, expects “to return to normal around here before too long.”