Ventura County Crop Loss From Storms: $52 Million

Even after two weeks of sunshine, Oxnard grower Humberto Candelario is still reeling from a series of storms that battered his small strawberry farm.

Not a day goes by that he doesn’t find fruit cracked or rotted by pounding rains that soaked Southern California this month.

He has had to trash tons of berries. And he has looked on helplessly as the record deluge washed away as much as $200,000 in production and potential revenue, turning his once-booming strawberry season into a salvage operation.

“It’s pretty bad,” Candelario said last week at a field where crews scrambled to clean rows of mud-caked berries. “I’m still throwing fruit away. It’s going to take a long time to recover.”

He is not alone. Across Ventura County, growers reported $52 million in damage from the recent storms, which dumped more than a foot of rain on some fields and turned vast swaths of farmland into muddy, impassable swamps.

Orange and avocado trees tumbled into turbulent rivers, while nursery stock was swept from creek banks and consumed by roiling floodwaters. Walls of water broke through drainage channels, ripped out irrigation systems and covered farmland in thick mounds of silt and debris.

While statewide farm damage was still being tallied, officials believe no place was hit harder than Ventura County.

“Based on the damage figures reported so far, it certainly appears that Ventura County suffered the brunt of the impact,” said Dave Kranz, a spokesman with the California Farm Bureau.

Strawberry growers reported $20 million in losses. Citrus and avocado growers lost $10 million, nursery owners reported $8.6 million in damage and celery growers took a $5.5-million hit.

By comparison, Riverside County farmers estimated $5 million in crop damage, San Bernardino reported $2 million and San Diego had about $1 million.

Retailers said they don’t expect the crop losses to have much effect on supermarket pricing.

State and local officials declared Ventura County a disaster area, and farmers are hoping the federal government follows suit, opening the door to federal disaster relief.

As bad as it was, some Ventura County farmers say they’ve seen worse. A 1990 cold snap caused $130 million in crop losses, wiping out a third of the county’s orange and avocado crops and putting more than 7,000 laborers out of work.

Still, this month’s storms put a good-sized dent in the county’s $1-billion farm economy, the 10th-largest in the state. And for those hardest hit, it could take a while to dig out.

“It’s going to be a serious challenge for some people,” said fourth-generation farmer David Schwabauer, president of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. His orchards north of Moorpark sustained about $50,000 in damage.

“Some are dealing with significant losses,” Schwabauer said. “It’s going to take months of work -- in some cases years of work -- to try to put things back together.”

The rains weren’t all bad. Citrus and avocado growers will profit from the long soaking, which helped satiate thirsty trees and will cut irrigation costs. And cattle ranchers, who have been struggling to find suitable pastureland for their animals, will be helped as the moisture regenerates rangeland grasses. But even for those ranchers, the water became too much.

Ojai grower Rob Davis watched as the floodwaters eroded creek banks near his ranches and gobbled up dozens of trees. He put the damage at hundreds of thousands of dollars and was putting together a plan to shore up creek banks to protect his property from future damage.

“We have five family ranches and they all have ‘creek’ as their middle name. That’s not good when you have floods like we had here,” said Davis, a third-generation citrus and avocado grower. “This is by far the worst [rain damage] I’ve ever seen.”

On the banks of the Santa Clara River, several nurseries were badly damaged by storms that dumped as much as 2 feet of rain over the last month.

At the Valley Crest Tree Co., president Robert Crudup put his losses at about half a million dollars, an estimate he said could climb as crews dig out the muck.

A creek that runs through the Fillmore-area nursery breached its banks, putting 3 feet of water on the property and leaving behind a mess of silt and other debris.

He said the nursery is strewn with uprooted citrus trees and river rocks the size of basketballs.

The nursery has crop insurance, but Crudup said the damage wasn’t substantial enough for it to kick in.

And although he knows there is some potential for federal aid, he said he was not counting on that money coming through.

“At the end of the day, we’re all farmers and we know we’re subject to wind, rain, freeze and drought,” said Crudup, adding that his crews had prepared as well as they could have for the rains.

“It comes with the territory,” he said. “All you can do is clean up, move on and open for business.”