CROPS PUMMELED IN VENTURA COUNTY.Byline: Sonia Giordani Daily News Staff Writer Ventura County's row crops incurred more than $5.5 million in damage from Tuesday's storms and subsequent flooding, the county agricultural commissioner reported Wednesday. The valuable first harvests of the delicate strawberries suffered the most, with a preliminary estimated loss of $3.5 million. While most of the strawberry plants managed to keep above the water and can be saved, the first soft fruits that began to mature late last month were badly beaten by the rain. Damages to other low-lying row crops in the county - celery celery, biennial plant (Apium graveolens) of the family Umbelliferae (parsley family), of wide distribution in the wild state throughout the north temperate Old World and much cultivated also in America. , broccoli broccoli (brŏk`əlē) [Ital.,=sprouts], variety of cabbage grown for the edible immature flower panicles. It is the same variety (Brassica oleracea botrytis) as the cauliflower and is similarly cultivated. , cauliflower cauliflower (kô`lĭflou'ər, käl`ĭ–), variety of cabbage, with an edible head of condensed flowers and flower stems. Broccoli is the horticultural variety (botrytis); both were cultivated in Roman times. and sod - were estimated at $2 million collectively. Since most of such crops are located in the rich-soiled fields of the Oxnard Plain The Oxnard Plain is a large coastal plain in southwest Ventura County, California bounded by the Santa Monica Mountains, the Santa Susana Mountains, and Oak Ridge (beyond which lies the Conejo Valley) to the east, the Topatopa Mountains to the north, the Santa Clara River Valley , the heavy rains had the largest affect on farms in the western part of the county. ``And one of the difficult things now is that more storms will be coming. Certainly, this is a tough time for a lot of the growers to deal with,'' said David Buettner, chief deputy agricultural commissioner. ``There's so much moisture in the fields that it's hard to get out there and harvest. And with the softer fruits, many have to be picked or they will decay.'' Strawberry grower Mike Conroy
An accountant by profession, Mike Conroy said he was focusing on the good news that none of the fine-leafed plants lining his 90-acre strawberry farm were under water. ``We (the growers) are pretty much all in the same boat. The fruit's been pretty badly damaged so we're going through a mode we refer to as stripping,'' Conroy explained. Workers comb the waterlogged wa·ter·logged adj. 1. Nautical Heavy and sluggish in the water because of flooding, as in the hold: a waterlogged ship. 2. fields and pick the battered fruits from the plants before they have a chance to decay and spread disease. Conroy said they also try to salvage the half-ripe fruits currently growing before the next round of storms hit. ``You learn to take the storms as they come,'' said Conroy. ``It's one of the gambles we take. Twenty years TWENTY YEARS. The lapse of twenty years raises a presumption of certain facts, and after such a time, the party against whom the presumption has been raised, will be required to prove a negative to establish his rights. 2. ago, we weren't even harvesting strawberries until March or later.'' While the storms caused considerable damage to the county's crops this season, damage is not expected to rival the proportion of crop losses due to the rains and floods in January 1995. In six days early that year, $22.7 million in crop damage was reported with $8.5 million in the strawberry fields Strawberry Field was a Salvation Army children's home in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool, England. The earliest reference to 'Strawberry Field' dates to 1870. In 1912 it was transferred to a wealthy merchant whose widow sold the estate to The Salvation Army in 1934. alone, Buettner said. Agriculture is the largest industry in Ventura County. It generated $851.9 million in sales last year. |
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