Fear of ICE raids turns the county’s crop report into a conversation on immigration.

Three days after President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that the immigration raids he promised for Sunday, June 23, would be postponed to an unspecified date, the ricochet of the missive was heard inside a meeting room at the County of Monterey Agricultural Center. It turned a routine press conference about the 2018 crop report into a vivid example of just one of the struggles faced by the county’s $4.25 billion agriculture industry.

A woman in the audience stood up to relay, in Spanish, to a panel of industry leaders and Agricultural Commissioner Henry Gonazales that just the day before, 15 fieldworkers she supervises did not show up for work out of fear they would be apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

“The economy could go down and the crops will perish.”

“We’re afraid to go out and work,” she said, with Gonzales serving as translator. “The economy could go down and the crops will perish. What can be done?”

It’s an intractable problem that serves as just one of many issues beyond farmers’ control. Monterey County Farm Bureau Executive Director Norm Groot noted earlier in the press conference how events like last year’s recalls over E. coli concerns caused the county’s romaine sales to fall by 24 percent. He said things like labor shortages, tariffs, weather and pests create volatility in the market illustrated by last year’s results.

“Any other business that experiences a 24-percent decline in one year would find that catastrophic, even unsustainable,” Groot said.

Overall, the gross production value of the county’s crops fell by 3.7 percent since 2017. Leaf lettuce remained the number-one crop, but fell in value by 11 percent due to the romaine recalls. Strawberries remained number two, slightly increasing in value by almost 2 percent, thanks to an increase in pricing of strawberries headed toward processing. Yet head lettuce, at number three, decreased in value due to a drop in pricing.

One of the brightest spots in the report was for wine grapes, which rose from the number six position to number five, thanks to the best year in the region’s history, said Kim Stemler, executive director of the Monterey County Vintners and Growers Association.

When it comes to the looming challenge of immigration, Chris Valdez, the president of the Grower-Shipper Association, encouraged the forewoman and other members of the community to share their stories at a public town hall with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue who will be leading a meeting on Friday, June 28, from 9-10am at the Watsonville Water Resources Center.