'The margins are so minimal:' Ventura County farmers take stock of damage after latest storm
Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct an error in the name of the Ventura County Agricultural Commissioner's office. A crawdad unfurled from its hiding place, planting eight legs in the silty muck left behind by the floods, and brandished its pincers.
Displaced from the Santa Clara River several dozen yards away, the little warrior staunchly defended its new home: a 6-inch deep puddle of water around Anthony Bibian's strawberry field near Ventura.
This week's rainstorms blocked roads, flooded buildings and took out a train bridge in the hills ringing the county.
As the floodwaters poured through the Santa Clara watershed, they also overwhelmed the banks of the river, flooding fields along the river's edge and wiping out crops and livestock operations. Damages could be in the millions of dollars.
Bibian estimated he could lose more than $500,000 of strawberries across his 70 acres with the picking window for the property cut short by a month. That's not counting the money he'll have to sink into cleaning and re-grading the fields. His company, Guayabito Farms, will transition to a different location for the next planting cycle, but it's still a difficult pill to swallow.
"The margins are so minimal," he said over the phone while taking a break from clean-up Wednesday afternoon. "When you have disasters like this, it's hard to keep going."
Farmers and ranchers all along the river – and other waterways – were similarly hit, said Korinne Bell, the county's Chief Deputy Agriculture Commissioner.
"There was just so much water that came so quickly," she said. "It was impossible to get rid of all that water."
The Ventura County Agriculture Commissioner's office hasn't yet had time to assess the damage wrought by this week's storm, Bell said, but the anecdotes have been flooding in. She's heard of crops "completely wiped out" and livestock operations that couldn't save all of their animals. "If you farm near a river, you were impacted," she said.
On Tuesday, she looked on at one riverside property as the current cut into the riverbank, pulling avocado trees into the torrent.
"It's awesome and terrifying at the same time," she said. "It's kind of amazing what water can do."
Bell, who lives near Santa Paula and has been working for the commission for 17 years, said she hasn't seen flooding this bad since 2005, when heavy rains caused a huge landslide in La Conchita.
Bibian has been farming near the river for 12 years and rebuilt after flooding in 2017, but said he'd never seen the field flood so badly.
At their peak, the floodwaters covered the entire crop in several feet of water and were powerful enough to lift one of Bibian's 40-foot shipping containers and deposit it in a stand of trees a quarter mile down the field. After much searching, Bibian found a smaller, 20-foot container washed into the riverbed, but he doesn't think it's recoverable.
By Tuesday evening, much of the water had subsided, collecting in the furrows between strawberry beds and pooling along the edge of the fields.
Everywhere the floodwaters touched, they left a layer of silt and gravel over the crops. In some places, lengths of fencing and piles of brush lay strewn across the beds. Guayabito Farms won't be able to pick anymore strawberries, Bibian said, for worries that the plants will soak up toxins from the flood.
Down the road, at the corner of Olivas Park Drive and closed-off Victoria Avenue, Jaime Lopez's 16 acres of strawberries were even worse off. He stood by his neighbor's roadside strawberry stand Tuesday afternoon, gazing out over a glassy pond that pooled where his crops should be.
"It's hard to even recover," he said.
With the floodwater refusing to subside, Lopez had so far been unable to assess the total damage. He pointed out a tilted shipping container, a pair of trucks and some tractors at the far end of the field and wondered if his insurance would cover any of the damage.
The city of Ventura declared a local state of emergency Monday night, allowing it to apply for emergency relief funds from the state and federal government. Lopez's fields are on county land, so he'll only benefit if county officials declare a state of emergency of their own.
This has happened to Lopez before, in Camarillo in 2005 and in this location six years ago. The last time, it took two months to clean up and Lopez said that some buyers wouldn't touch his crop because of food safety concerns.
This is worse. This time, he said, the field is so badly damaged he won't be able to get anything from it until October, when the next strawberry picking season begins.
Lopez says he sunk roughly $50,000 per acre into planting this year's crop and lost five to six months of strawberry picking – his fields grow on a different cycle than Bibian. Overall, Lopez estimates he lost between $500,000 and $600,000 in the single night of bad rain.
He pulled up a black and white security camera video on his phone, one he watched in real time from his home in Oxnard the night before. It showed flood waters several feet high picking up the shipping container and dumping it on its side.
He half-grins, maybe from morbid amusement at the destruction or maybe because he believes it'll all work out.
"If you see me like this," he said. "It's because I've got out of this before."
Isaiah Murtaugh covers education for the Ventura County Star in partnership with Report for America. Reach him at isaiah.murtaugh@vcstar.com or 805-437-0236 and follow him on Twitter @isaiahmurtaugh and @vcsschools. You can support this work with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Ventura County farmers take stock of damage after rainstorm
