The Country’s Most Productive Farmland Is Now One of Its Worst COVID-19 Hotspots
California’s Central Valley will receive COVID-19 “strike teams.”
On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom called the Central Valley “our biggest area of concern.”
That’s not great news in a state that has the most COVID-19 positive tests in the country, and which broke the single-day COVID-19 death toll three times in the past week. The Central Valley, though, has seen test rates, deaths, and hospitalizations spike recently, and much of that spike is due to the fact that the Central Valley is probably the most important agricultural region in the country.
The Central Valley stretches throughout much of inland California, including metropolitan areas like Sacramento, Fresno, and Bakersfield. Though it makes up less than a percent of the country’s agricultural land, it produces about eight percent of the country’s agriculture by dollar value; about 25 percent of all American food; and more than half of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts.
Agriculture, as you might expect, dominates the Central Valley economy, and much of the area’s farming is done by Latinx and immigrant workers. Those workers have been declared essential during the pandemic and have continued working, but farmworkers live and work in situations which do not fare well when faced with a contagious virus. The Los Angeles Times reports that many, if not most, farmworkers in the Central Valley live in dense apartments. They also share transportation from housing to work, which provides another close-quarters space where COVID-19 can spread.
Further, workers are often in precarious situations legally, either undocumented or using work visas, and may be afraid for their livelihood or status in the country if they were to report unsafe conditions. An investigation from the Los Angeles Times declared that “the coronavirus is also ravaging Latino farmworkers because they have long been treated as disposable labor in California, risking their lives in heat waves and pesticide-laden fields to help put food on people’s tables.” Putting farmworkers, especially Latinx and immigrant farmworkers, in dangerous situations is nothing new to American agriculture.
Newsom, in a public statement on Monday, announced some modest declines in parts of California’s positive test rates and other metrics, including Los Angeles. But the thrust of the statement was about the Central Valley and its struggles. Over the past two weeks, the Central Valley has positive test rates as much as two times higher than the state average. In some counties, the number of cases per 100,000 residents reached over 52, two times the bar for the worst risk level set by Harvard. Hospitalizations hit the Central Valley at 50 percent higher than in Los Angeles.
Because eight of the counties that make up the Central Valley are running out of hospital space, Newsom said that some patients will be moved to adjacent areas, to free up beds—a strategy first used in Imperial County, near the Arizona border, which was utterly slammed by COVID-19.
Newsom said that $6.5 million will be allocated to families, individuals, and nonprofits to help with essentials like food and rent, though did not elaborate on how exactly that will work. That money will come from “philanthropy,” organized by California nonprofit Sierra Health Foundation. That’s in addition to the $52 million Newsom asked the California legislature to approve for epidemiological efforts, like contact tracing, testing, and isolation, last week.
Also last week, Newsom announced a plan to form “strike teams” which aim to help hospitals and other essential businesses trace and contain the virus. Previously, these strike teams have been used to enforce state laws on communities that have refused to follow proper distancing and mask-wearing protocols; Newsom has actually had to threaten to suspend funding from Central Valley towns that have been unwilling to do so.
Previous reports from farmworkers have indicated that their workplace safety is inadequate, without, in some cases, proper physical distancing, a regular supply of masks and gloves, and without the presence of safety regulators to ensure that best practices are followed. According to the Los Angeles Times, lawmakers have until August 31 to send bills to Newsom before adjourning for the rest of the year.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].The Country’s Most Productive Farmland Is Now One of Its Worst COVID-19 Hotspots
by Dan Nosowitz, Modern Farmer
August 5, 2020
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
What is really happening here has nothing to do with any virus, but is entirely about political corruption, which has always employed many different kinds of data and “numbers” games to maintain control and power, and used to defeat the “enemy.” Many of us know what this is all about. Someone from CA commented: “A friend of mine lives in that area and comes from a farming family. Her brother and brother in law are both farmers. She told me the powers that be dumped a lot their farming water into the ocean earlier this year. Wouldn’t let them have… Read more »
Talking about the problem isn’t actually helping anyone These people need outreach, they need testing,motels where they can quarantine, they need masks and ways to get to work that dont involve having to be in a tightly packed vehicle. they need messaging about how to keep safe, not to have these big family gatherings and parties, they may need access to food delivery so these people who let the rest of us eat can safely convalesce if they are ill without having to go to the store. they need to have their rent be paid so they don’t go to… Read more »