Wildfire update from the California Farm Bureau Federation

» Posted 4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 29, 2007 «

As family farmers return to their farms in wildfire-damaged regions of Southern California, they’re learning more about how the fires damaged their crops, equipment and buildings.

Here are several "voices from the fire line," gathered Monday from among farmers who lost crops to the wildfires and to the punishing Santa Ana winds that propelled them:

• "It (fire) destroyed 1,500 avocado trees, about all of them. Not only did it destroy the trees, it destroyed all the irrigation system, plus my crop. I probably had about $80,000 to $100,000 worth of avocados ready to be picked in the next month or two." – Jim Thoryk, avocado farmer, Escondido
• "In our San Diego groves, more than 200 acres of avocados were scorched or burned. … It’s going to take at least a week to get back in place irrigation hose burned in the fire and there are a lot of other repair needs waiting for us to do. All the groves are stressed right now because of the Santa Ana winds. We haven’t watered for a week and under those conditions it’s more likely to have crop loss." – Tim Hanify, field operations director for Eco Farms, Temecula
• "With regards to the avocados, we’re still (estimating) between a quarter to a third, maybe closer to a third of the crop being on the ground (after last week’s windstorms). There’s nothing to do with it because it’s all too immature to pick up, so it’s a loss. Right now, we’ve got several guys running around just trying to clean up the mess from broken limbs and broken eucalyptus limbs as well that have fallen, and trees that have blown over." – David Schwabauer, Ventura County farmer
• "The sand buried most of my pumpkins. You can see the stems of the pumpkins and the ones that didn’t get buried got so sandblasted that it just peeled the skin off of them. We were going to go through our second picking and now I had to buy 20 loads out of state to cover my orders." – George Codero, Riverside County farmer

In talking to more farmers, we learn about more crops that suffered damage. In Riverside County, farmers say strong winds harmed carrots and potatoes growing in the Coachella Valley. Date farmers say they also lost fruit and that some taller date palms blew down during the windstorms. A San Diego County beekeeper reported losing more than 500 hives to wildfire.

Quantifiable loss estimates from county agricultural commissioners have not yet been released. As they are, we’ll report on them here.

The California Farm Bureau Federation, the state’s largest farm organization, works to protect family farms and ranches on behalf of nearly 92,000 members.

Contact: Dave Kranz
Phone: 916/561-5550
news@cfbf.com

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