SALINAS – While it will be a few weeks at least before the local agriculture industry has a firm grasp of the mess left by torrential rain and repeated flooding this year, the meter is running.
According to unofficial estimates, some 20,000 acres of local farmland flooded in recent storms, threatening a costly road to recovery. Not catastrophic, in the grand scheme of Monterey County’s 366,000 acres of productive farmland, but far from insignificant either, with impacts already felt industry-wide and more surely on the way as slowly receding flood waters reveal just how much havoc winter weather wreaked over the past three months.
Waiting to see how damages tally