Monterey County agriculture hit with damage "greater than January storms," officials say.

The series of storms now hitting Monterey County are expected to impact the county’s agriculture sector even greater than January’s storms, officials said at a press conference Monday, March 13.

Crop fields in the Salinas Valley and Pajaro Valley are now “experiencing significant flooding and inundation,” according to Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau agricultural industry group. Groot said that flooding “appears to be greater along the Salinas River than what we experienced in January,” when storms impacted more than 15,000 acres of crop fields and caused an estimated $336 million in damage and losses.

Monterey County Agricultural Commissioner Juan Hidalgo echoed that sentiment, describing the damage now being sustained as “quite alarming” and noting that the impact to Salinas Valley growers is “definitely going to be much bigger than what we saw in January, based on some of the images of the flooding we’re seeing and based on the evacuation orders.”

Additionally, farms in the Pajaro Valley, which were mostly unscathed during January’s storms, are also experiencing significant flooding and damage after floodwaters breached the Pajaro River’s levees, forcing residents of the town of Pajaro to evacuate. 

Like the Salinas Valley, Groot said the Pajaro Valley now “has many acres of crop fields currently under water,” which “poses a serious threat to crop production for the entire spring [and] possibly longer” due to soil-testing protocols that can take up to 60 days to ensure fields aren’t infected with pathogens.

Hidalgo noted that the Pajaro Valley is home to a lot of strawberry and raspberry production, with many of those crops planted in the fall for production in the spring—a harvest now threatened by flooding.

“This is definitely going to have an impact on any production yields,” Hidalgo said. “Plants can be quite hearty and they can recover, but if they stay underwater for too many days, it’s definitely going to have some significant impacts to those growers.” As a result, affected growers could be “looking at anywhere from 30-to-50-percent yield losses” this spring, he added.

Groot blamed flood conditions in the Salinas Valley on inadequate maintenance of the Salinas River channel, which he said has seen its flow capacity “significantly reduced” as a result of sandbar buildup and the excessive growth of invasive, non-native vegetation like arundo. He also pointed to the “deteriorated” condition of the river’s levees due to stringent permitting restrictions on private landowners along the river, and said the current situation “highlights the need for a comprehensive channel maintenance program that state and federal agencies have been reluctant to issue permits for in the past decades.”