California flooding is impacting farms and food prices. Here’s how
A year ago, Kirk Gilkey was taking stock of his newly planted cotton, watching green shoots poke through freshly tilled dirt. These days, he has a view of nothing but water. Nearly two-thirds of the Gilkey family’s 8,700 acres in the southern San Joaquin Valley has been engulfed by Tulare Lake, the long-dormant body of freshwater that has re-emerged with the wet winter and grown to half the size of Lake Tahoe. … The area, between Fresno and Bakersfield, is one of California’s agricultural hubs hit hardest by this year’s historic flooding. While the toll on the state’s farming industry is still being tallied, crop losses are expected to soar to potentially billions of dollars, on top of billions more in property damage. It’s a modest but noticeable dent in California’s roughly $50 billion of total farm production annually and acute for the affected regions and their mainstay crops.
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