Sonoma County farmers forced to adjust to remain viable during the coronavirus pandemic

Agriculture is a tough business, forcing farmers to navigate changing consumer trends, a tight labor market and extreme weather.

During the global coronavirus pandemic, there are even more obstacles as Gabriel Castañeda noted last week as he planted greenhouse seedlings at his father’s Santa Rosa farm for this summer’s vegetable crop of squash and zucchini and tomatillos. Humberto Castañeda Produce is the largest vegetable grower in Sonoma County. Besides the produce, the business has diversified into more profitable crops such as 15 acres of wine grapes along Fulton Road and an almond orchard in Merced.

“For us it has been a little more difficult,” Castañeda said of the virus-induced shutdown of most business and industry in the county and nationwide. “With farming, you got to do what you got to do at a certain time.”

While Castañeda plants seedlings he will harvest in June, he has other things weighing on him related to the invisible pathogen that’s upended daily routines for most people. His family’s farm is supposed to bring back seasonal workers from Mexico to harvest various crops, and he wonders about possible problems getting them here. “If we aren’t able to bring our employees back because of this, then we are in big trouble,” he said.

And there’s the worry that if the county’s stay-at-home order stays in place longer than early May, the many restaurants now closed won’t be buying vegetables from his June harvest.

The plight of the Castañedas offers a window to what other local farmers are experiencing with the uncertainty of the pandemic. Agriculture is deemed an essential business in California, so Sonoma County farmers are working and implementing additional worker safety measures to keep production rolling in a crucial sector producing more than $1 billion worth of products a year.

The ag industry is heavily regulated, so the transition to additional worker protections hasn’t been that disruptive, said Tawny Tesconi, executive director of the Sonoma County Farm Bureau.

Office staff is working at home while crews outside are adhering to social distancing guidance - which is much easier out in the fields - as well as good sanitation practices.

“There’s a lot of things we are already doing that involve protective gear and things like that, whether there is a virus or not,” Tesconi said.

Still, across the vineyards and farms of Sonoma County, each part of the ag sector is experiencing its own disruptions in the marketplace, many of which have temporarily forced operational changes. It ranges from the Petaluma egg farm that cannot keep pace with demand, to the south county duck farm reinventing itself for deliveries to consumers since its restaurant business mostly dried up.

Wine grapes are the biggest crop in Sonoma County, representing about 70% of the cash value of the overall annual yield. The growing season is in its early stages, with buds breaking on vines across the region, and they aren’t expected to bloom for more than a month. Thus, the demand for vineyard workers outside of maintenance crews is minimal.

Vineyard managers, however, are preparing for the summer and lining up grape pickers. Big operations use the federal H-2A visa program to secure needed workers from Mexico for the annual harvest. Duff Bevill of Bevill Vineyard Management in Healdsburg said he is in good position because he brought his 60 seasonal workers from Mexico in January and they are already performing chores with the recent milder temperatures allowing full work days.

The workers live in dormitory-style housing, though, so Bevill’s main mission has been making sure they stay healthy. For example, only two men from the crew go grocery shopping for all of them.

“As long as they are all healthy, there’s less of a concern. As long as they are not traveling around the community, which they don’t, then separation is less of an issue,” Bevill said. “We try to keep them isolated at their house, which is the dormitory.”

There are still concerns about the health of local farmworkers. Armando Elenes, secretary-?treasurer for the United Farm Workers, called such dormitory-?style living arrangements “a ticking time bomb” if one worker contracts the coronavirus.

The union represents only a few workers at area wineries - such as Balletto Vineyards in Santa Rosa, Gallo of Sonoma and St. Supery Vineyards and Winery in Rutherford - and has found those businesses are adhering to proper safety measures recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We are not finding a problem with our union companies. Those guys are stepping up, especially in the North Coast,” Elenes said.

Maintaining social distancing of at least 6 feet - a key tactic to curbing spread of COVID-19 - has been easier to manage for some agribusinesses. One would be local diaries, where workers typically live on the property and work can be done in split shifts.

“All of our employees live here on the dairy. I think that is kind of a big help,” said Doug Beretta, operator of a family-?owned organic dairy in Santa Rosa.

While juggling the increased demands to protect their workers and keep the nation’s food supply chain functioning, farmers also are adapting to the changing demands of the retail marketplace during the pandemic.

At the Petaluma Egg Farm operated by the Mahrt family, employees have been working overtime to keep pace with demand for more eggs. Some grocery stores have placed a purchase limit on them but more shoppers have been buying extra cartons to make baked goods during the county’s public health emergency stay-at-home order, which went into effect March 18 and runs through at least May 3. Residents have been baking at levels usually only seen the week before Thanksgiving.

“People have bought a lot of eggs, so we have been working long days to try to get as many eggs out. … We have only a limited amount of chickens,” Jonathan Mahrt said. “We are not carrying any inventory right now. We are selling everything we have every day.”

At Liberty Ducks in Petaluma, however, the Reichert family had to scramble because 90% of the business before the coronavirus was sales to restaurants, said Jen Reichert, whose enterprise was started by her father, Jim.

“By the third week of March, our sales dropped by 80%,” Reichert said, realizing her family “had to do something to weather the storm.”

In the aftermath of restaurant closings, the family pivoted to consumer sales and delivery, plus launched a site to take online orders. Selling ducks directly to consumers was not a big challenge for Reichert, since she also has a wine label, Raft, that’s sold that way.

For vegetable farmer Castañeda, he hopes to extend the growing season - weather permitting - as much as possible to bring in extra income. Last year, late spring rains and a mid-?October frost shortened the season for produce.

“We didn’t make pretty much anything with the produce business” last year, he said. “The only thing that saved us - we also have wine grapes.”

His grape contracts with wineries are set for the 2020 harvest, offering reassurance amid the pandemic and the glut of grapes in the market as retail wine sales flatten.

A 26-year-old father of three children, Castañeda said he shares the community’s concerns as the coronavirus outbreak spreads in Sonoma County. But he also knows farming is not a desk job, especially on a ranch where workers pick 18,000 pounds to 20,000 pounds of produce in a day.

“I have to be out here working, so that way I can feed my family,” he said. “Us farmers have to keep feeding California now and the rest of the United States. We got to keep going.”

You can reach Staff Writer Bill Swindell at 707-521-5223 or bill.swindell@pressdemocrat.com.