The Best Time for a Flood

The pictures are distressingly familiar: farmhouses sitting in the middle of muddy lakes, farmland under water, farmers looking anxiously at the skies.

The last time we saw them, in the Salinas Valley flood of March 1995, they opened a season of woe for produce shoppers. Prices for some vegetables skyrocketed to as much as 10 times their normal cost. The harvests of some fruits and nuts were cut quite literally in half.

As The Times reported Tuesday, that probably won’t happen this year. Here’s why: Three months and a couple of hundred miles make a big difference. At this time of year, most of those vegetable fields in the San Joaquin Valley are lying fallow and all of the flooded orchards and vineyards are dormant, largely immune to damage.

Although the San Joaquin valley is one the most productive farming areas in America, most of our food in the winter comes from the warmer southern part of the state--mostly Ventura and Imperial counties--and from Mexico.

“Really, if something like this has to happen, this is the best time of year it could have happened,” says Robert Rolan, Madera County agricultural commissioner.

The 1995 floods in the Salinas Valley, for example, occurred when there were crops in the fields and when fruit and nut trees were in flower and ready to pollinate.

At this time of year, though, there are only a few winter vegetables being harvested--cauliflower, broccoli, celery and carrots primarily--and even most of those crops are coming from the south. Wholesale vegetable prices are virtually unchanged from a week ago.

The major agricultural effect of this year’s floods seems to be greatest on grains--wheat, barley, field corn and alfalfa--and on dairy producers, particularly in Stanislaus County, where milk is the No. 1 agricultural product.

“Our dairies have been majorly affected,” says Donald Cripe, county agricultural commissioner. “We’re not just talking about the difficulty of physically moving thousands of cows, even though that’s a major undertaking. But then you have milk production lost. Dairy animals are very structured. They don’t like strange people or strange places, and they just stop giving milk.”

Cripe also says that Stanislaus County might have as many as 60,000 acres of farmland under water and, for many crops, the impact might not be felt for months. Still to come are the insidious effects of soil erosion and silting, which can weaken orchards.

The same is also true in Yuba County, where a levee break south of Yuba City flooded a wide area of walnut, prune and peach orchards as well as some grain fields.

Other than that, the most significant effect of the rains is probably the delay of the start of the many farm activities that lead up to planting.

“Any time you get this much rain, it causes problems,” says Dennis Plann, deputy agricultural commissioner for Fresno County. “Normally we’d be planting tomatoes in seven to 10 days. Now it’s going to be that long before farmers can even get their feet on that ground.”