Preparations for El Nino Bear Fruit

IRVINE —  Since the planting season began several months ago, Doug Circle has been planning for El Nino. The strawberry grower leveled his fields for better drainage, dug deeper ditches to collect runoff and cleared pipes that channeled standing water away from his crops.

When the rains came last weekend more fiercely than promised, dumping nearly as much water on Irvine in eight hours as in a year, Circle’s preparation paid off. Looking across his soggy fields Sunday, where only 3 of his 100 acres of berries were washed away, Circle considered himself lucky.

“We’re discouraged by the crop loss,” he said, “but we’re blessed we didn’t have more damage than we did, considering the size of the storm.”

Indeed, the storm could have wreaked worse damage on the region’s farms--far worse, if not for two factors:

One, the storm came early in the growing season, when the vast majority of berries were unripened.

And two, many farmers were prepared for El Nino--a warming of the Pacific Ocean that disrupts weather globally and is named after the Christ child because it arrives around Christmas.

“We have had some damage, but we don’t know how much yet,” said Allan Price, purchasing agent for Orange County Produce. Several farmers around Irvine were hardest hit, he added, losing between 2 and 20 acres of mostly strawberries, the county’s major crop, and small amounts of lettuce, celery and green beans.

“We knew El Nino was coming, and farmers took initiative to protect their crops as much as possible. It could have been much worse than it was,” Price said.

Nurseries also felt the force of El Nino. At Village Nurseries in Orange on Saturday, salaried employees caught up on paperwork while hourly workers were sent home. Business was that slow.

“Typically, on a Saturday, we’d do $3,000 to $5,000 of business, and we only did $500,” said assistant manager Laura Waterworth. On Sunday, the company fared even worse, totaling only $200 in sales.

Steps were taken during the storm to protect perishable plants like poinsettias, which if lost, could have eliminated a major source of December sales.

But while tarps shielded poinsettias from rain, Village’s supply of sod was wiped out. Fortunately, Waterworth said, there was less sod on hand than usual, as deliveries were hampered by last week’s wet weather.

Seeing such heavy rain this soon raised a question in Waterworth’s mind: “If it starts this early, what’s January, February, March--the normal rainy season--going to bring us?”

At 6 a.m. Monday, farmhands were still draining fields, filling sandbags, and washing away mud from green berries and flowering plants that have yet to bear fruit.

Circle, who farms 200 acres in the county, said overflowing drainage ditches caused most of the damage. For those crops, there is no recourse. Unless higher market prices bail farmers out, profits are down the drain.

Jack Fujishige said 6 out of 65 acres were lost from his family’s strawberry fields. Workers dug deeper ditches, one of them 5 feet deep and 15 feet across, but they still overflowed.

It’s too late to replant, the Irvine farmer said, but not all is lost.

“Our fields were made to drain, and luckily we haven’t started harvesting, so we came through well,” said Bill Ito, chairman of the California Strawberry Commission, who also grows berries in Los Alamitos and Irvine.

If any ripe fruit was lost, it was negligible. “We were lucky this storm didn’t come later in the season,” Ito said.

The storm’s true effect will not be known until next year, when vines, farmers hope, will bear plump red berries, not misshapen ones from excessive water. Still, Circle expects to get an early answer when he starts harvesting some berries in two to three weeks.

“The storm was not devastating,” he said. “It won’t shut us down for a viable crop.”

For now, growers hope for clear skies and gentle breezes that allow roots to dry, while giving the crops--and the farmers--time to recover before El Nino’s next visit.

“We’ll clean up and do the best we can to maintain what we have to work with,” Circle said.