Even after two weeks of sunshine, Oxnard grower Humberto Candelario is still reeling from a series of storms that battered his small strawberry farm.
Not a day goes by that he doesn't find fruit cracked or rotted by pounding rains that soaked Southern California this month.
He has had to trash tons of berries. And he has looked on helplessly as the record deluge washed away as much as $200,000 in production and potential revenue, turning his once-booming strawberry season into a salvage operation.
"It's pretty bad," Candelario said last week at a field where crews scrambled to clean rows of mud-caked berries. "I'm still throwing fruit away. It's going to take a long time to recover."
He is not alone. Across Ventura County, growers reported $52 million in damage from the recent storms, which dumped more than a foot of rain on some fields and turned vast swaths of farmland into muddy, impassable swamps.
Orange and avocado trees tumbled into turbulent rivers, while nursery stock was swept from creek banks and consumed by roiling floodwaters. Walls of water broke through drainage channels, ripped out irrigation systems and covered farmland in thick mounds of silt and debris.
While statewide farm damage was still being tallied, officials believe no place was hit harder than Ventura County.
"Based on the damage figures reported so far, it certainly appears that Ventura County suffered the brunt of the impact," said Dave Kranz, a spokesman with the California Farm Bureau.
Strawberry growers reported $20 million in losses. Citrus and avocado growers lost $10 million, nursery owners reported $8.6 million in damage and celery growers took a $5.5-million hit.
By comparison, Riverside County farmers estimated $5 million in crop damage, San Bernardino reported $2 million and San Diego had about $1 million.
Retailers said they don't expect the crop losses to have much effect on supermarket pricing.
State and local officials declared Ventura County a disaster area, and farmers are hoping the federal government follows suit, opening the door to federal disaster relief.
As bad as it was, some Ventura County farmers say they've seen worse. A 1990 cold snap caused $130 million in crop losses, wiping out a third of the county's orange and avocado crops and putting more than 7,000 laborers out of work.
Still, this month's storms put a good-sized dent in the county's $1-billion farm economy, the 10th-largest in the state. And for those hardest hit, it could take a while to dig out.
