Extreme weather creates a food crisis for California farmworkers
On a brisk afternoon in mid-January, Eloy Ortiz is pacing the back alley behind a white house in Watsonville, California, in the heart of California’s strawberry industry. The house is under an evacuation warning after weeks of torrential rain, but that hasn’t stopped hundreds of women and children from crowding around the back gate. … Ortiz is a board member and volunteer with the Center for Farmworker Families, a nonprofit that assists farmworker communities throughout Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties on California’s Central Coast. The group has been distributing food for over a decade, but this is a big crowd, even by their standards. Many of the women in line pick strawberries for a living, and the crop has taken a beating from California’s winter storms. Farmers face up to $200 million in damages, according to the California Strawberry Commission.
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