Jose Pineda Rivas could use the cash. He’s got rent to pay, and his tooth hurts so badly he needs to see a dentist.
But these days, money for fieldworkers like Rivas in this drought-parched stretch of California is about as scarce as rain. And the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.
The 61-year-old farmhand, who lives in a small home with his wife and a friend’s family, is hardly making enough to cover basic expenses, let alone pricey dental work. He thinks he can afford to get his aching tooth removed, he said. But actually replace it?
Not a chance.
As he tipped back his straw hat and morosely gazed at his flip phone on a recent day, Rivas explained that the crew boss at a nearby tomato farm was supposed to contact him about returning to work. But the call hadn’t come.
It’s the same desperate story all over the Central Valley.
Like many fieldworkers in Mendota, a rural community 35 miles west of Fresno dubbed the Cantaloupe Center of the World, Rivas finds his seasonal job of more than two decades at risk of disappearing because of the statewide drought.
Drought leaves field barren
Fields that normally come to life by April with the planting of tomatoes and melons have been left barren due to insufficient water. And that means less farm work to go around.
“Usually this time of year, we’ll all be going out and weeding and laying irrigation line,” Rivas said in Spanish. “None of that work has happened, and who knows when it will?”
A near-record dry winter has put California in the grip of its worst drought in decades. While many parts of the state have yet to feel any real impact – no cutbacks, no stiff rationing – that’s not the case in the farm towns of the San Joaquin Valley, where water is the touchstone of the economy and underpins the region’s standing as the most agriculturally productive in the nation.
About 20,000 farm jobs statewide stand to be lost this year out of 400,000, the bulk of them in the valley, said Jeffrey Michael, director of the Business Forecasting Center at the University of the Pacific in Stockton.
The estimate does not include thousands of additional jobs supporting agriculture: the truck drivers, packers and processors, as well as the merchants, real estate agents and teachers serving these farm communities.
“We know that this year unemployment is going to be significantly worse than it’s been in a long time,” said Michael, whose job loss projections are based on the amount of farmland likely to be fallowed.
The lost work, he added, will only compound hardship that bedevils many valley towns where unemployment rates consistently rank among the highest in the state.
In Mendota, where about half of the 11,000 residents are in families living below the federal poverty line, the jobless rate stood at 37 percent as of the last count in March, according to state data.
The mayor of Mendota suggested that unemployment could hit 50 percent by summer as the effects of the drought fully play out – a level higher than what was seen during the recent recession.
Farmers in California, where Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency last month, are facing hard choices as a drought threatens to ruin their crops. They must weigh the costs of paying for irrigation against the chance that their fields will never get enough water this season.
A striking picture illustrates the severity of the situation, as Northern California’s Folsom Lake, a reservoir northeast of Sacramento, is seen in January at only 17 percent of its capacity. In July 2011, “the lake was at 97 percent of total capacity and 130 percent of its historical average for that date,” according to NASA.
The federal agency says it is working with the California Department of Water Resources to help the state manage its water resources. Last month, NASA released other images showing the drought’s severity. As NPR member station KQED reported, the state’s snowpack is shown in January 2013 and last month. Much of it did not return.
Here are other updates on the situation:
NASA said today that it’s working to share satellite and weather data with California farmers and water officials to help them avoid wasting water, and to use it in the most efficient way possible. The space agency says a trial run of its Satellite Irrigation Management Support system in 2012 and 2013 “demonstrated sustained yields while reducing the amount of water used by up to 33 percent relative to standard practice.”
Growers of almonds — a state crop valued at $5 billion in 2012 — have been pulling trees out of the ground while they’re still in their prime, in desperate actions driven by high water costs. The AP spoke to a grower who watched crews rip 20 percent of his orchard out of the ground. A man who does that work for a living says business is up 75 percent because of the drought, and his crews are working from sunup to sundown.
Forecasts of rain and snow were welcomed by many Californians, as parts of the state could see more rain this week than they’ve had in the previous eight months together. But Time’s Bryan Walsh warns that even with that rainfall, “much of California will still be below average for precipitation this month. Since February tends to be the wettest month for California, that means that the state still has a larger and larger rainfall deficit to make up if this drought is to ever end.”
Contact Scurich Insurance Services today to get a review of your agriculture insurance.
Last week Governor Jerry Brown declared California is in a drought. A drought simply stated is a shortage of precipitation, whether it comes from rain or snow. There just simply isn’t any moisture in our lands. Problems that can stem from a drought can become catastrophic. Withered crops, high fire dangers, water shortages and livestock dying are just a few of the effects that a drought has on our land. Unemployment is another effect that a drought will bring. The loss of crops means no employment. In 2009, about 10,000 people lost their job due to the drought.
According to Brown, who was in San Francisco last week, “The drought accentuates and further displays the conflicts between north and south and between urban and rural parts of the state. So, as governor, I’ll be doing my part to bring people together and working through this.”
During this dry season, the rest of us need to be diligent as well. Conserve as much water as we can, including washing dishes all at once, don’t light fires when you’re camping and use only propane stoves. Right now, California is in danger of becoming a matchbox just waiting for the match to strike.
According to 58 year old Kevin Kester, “I am a fifth-generation cattle rancher, and it has never been this bad ever in my lifetime — and from my family’s history, it’s never been anywhere close to this bad ever.” The last drought that was comparable to the one we’re in now, according to his family’s history was in the 1890’s.
Contact us today for a quote for your agribusiness.
On Monday, December 30, 2014 in a small farming community just outside of Salinas, an unusual discovery was made. A crop circle appeared on a small farm in Chualar.
Take a look:
Debra Flanager, who is a braille transcriber from New Jersey said that the dots that were placed in the middle of the circle translate to:
At Scurich Insurance Services in Watsonville, we cater to the agriculture business at every level of production and service. If you run one machine or a hundred, we will be committed to being your premiere insurance agency. Our purpose is to provide the best value and service available, while maintaining the highest ethical standards with our clients, carriers, and the public. Some of our agricultural lines include:
Agribusiness
Hog Confinement
Grain Elevators
Feed Mills
Livestock Feed Lots
Custom Harvesting
Even if your business isn’t agriculture based, we can still help you with your commercial insurance needs. Contact us online, or give us a call at 1-800-320-3666.
Original content provided by Transformer Marketing
Critics of the U.S. crop insurance program called for cuts to it and other agribusiness subsidies as Congress revamps farm policy.
At a rally on Capitol Hill, Wisconsin Representatives Tom Petri, a Republican, and Ron Kind, a Democrat, called for lawmakers to re-examine U.S. farm spending for the next five years and revamp the nation’s crop insurance program.
“We’re asking these crop insurance companies to put a little bit of their skin in the game too, so it’s not all on the taxpayer back,” Kind told reporters at the event.
Under the insurance program, the U.S. taxpayer subsidizes the majority of premiums paid by farmers, covers much of the administrative costs tallied by insurers to run the program, and guarantees that all losses are covered, according to a series of articles published by Bloomberg News this week.
Crop insurance covered $117 billion worth of product in 2012, including almost all the corn, soybeans, cotton and wheat produced in the country. The U.S. Department of Agriculture spent about $14 billion last year on the program as the worst drought in a half century devastated plantings.
Supporters of crop insurance are stepping up their lobbying to preserve the program’s funding levels.
‘Political Process’
Richard Gibson, founder of American Agrisurance Inc. and a business consultant, told agents of NAU Country Insurance Co. in an e-mail this week obtained by Bloomberg News to lobby their lawmakers. He said crop insurance had become a target as Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to pass a 2014 budget or a stopgap measure to keep the federal government operating.
“I’ve been around this business since it started, and the bottom line to it is, it’s been a political process since day one,” Gibson said in a phone interview yesterday.
At today’s rally, Kind said the existing crop insurance program guarantees companies a 14 percent profit, forces the adoption of little risk and covers administrative and operating expenses.
“There’s not a business in the world that wouldn’t sign up for that offer, so why are we doing that in crop insurance program of the farm bill?” he said.
Jose Pineda Rivas could use the cash. He’s got rent to pay, and his tooth hurts so badly he needs to see a dentist.
