With planting and harvesting schedules disrupted, and date packinghouses sending less volume to market, some laborers say they are working fewer hours or struggling to find work altogether.
Tropical storm Hillary brought high winds and flooding to farms in southern California over the weekend, but specialty crop growers in the impact zone say the damage could have been worse.
Date shippers all agree that they are sitting on a potential gold mind. They believe they have a great item, that is versatile, has known health benefits, is so sweet it’s a great natural substitute for sugar and its shelf life is almost unsurpassed in the produce aisle.
The decision by state and county officials to prioritize Californians 65 and older delayed vaccinations for thousands of farmworkers for several weeks as infections began spreading, prompting growers and doctors to step in to fill the void.
When Monterey County finally reached out to say they had a batch of up to 1,500 vaccine doses for farmworkers, Valadez said no thanks.
“It’s all good,” Valadez wrote to Elsa Jimenez, Monterey’s director of health, in an emailon March 22. “No need to update any further.” In a follow-up interview, Valadez called the state-provided doses “almost a moot point.” They were already running their vaccination site exclusively for farmworkers so they didn’t need them.