Appliance Repair in Firebaugh, CA

As California enters its third year of drought, farmers in the state’s agricultural Central Valley, which produces a quarter of the United States’ food, say it could jeopardize an already strained food system.

“There are a lot of empty fields that aren’t being planted — something I’ve never seen before,” said Don Cameron, vice president and general manager of Terranova Ranch in Helm, California.

Cameron, who’s also president of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture, told Marketplace’s David Brancaccio that farmers are also contending with supply chain bottlenecks and price increases for crucial goods.

“All of our tractors run on diesel. So not only the cost for us here on the farm, but to get our products to the facilities for processing or to the markets has just skyrocketed,” he said. “We’ve seen [the price of] fertilizer double from a year ago. We just see all of our inputs getting more expensive — not only the inputs like that, but our labor cost has increased.” All of which could send prices higher at the grocery store.

“We grow a lot of processing tomatoes here, and for 2022 our price increased 25% — and our growers are saying that even at that, they’re barely making it,” Cameron said. “We anticipate another increase for the 2023 crop.”

The following is an edited transcript of Brancaccio’s conversation with Cameron.

David Brancaccio: I’m thinking some of your inputs are getting more expensive. I keep covering headline inflation figures, but then I start thinking about, for instance, the price of diesel fuel — you must use a lot of diesel.

Don Cameron: Quite a bit, all of our tractors run on diesel. So not only the cost for us here on the farm, but to get our products to the facilities for processing or to the markets has just skyrocketed. We’ve seen fertilizer double from a year ago. We just see all of our inputs getting more expensive — not only the inputs, like that, but our labor cost has increased. But I think the real key to our increases have been the lack of water here in California.

Brancaccio: And it must be especially frustrating for you — because you’ve spent a lot of time and energy thinking about preparing for California’s water situation and trying to build the infrastructure that would get you through the dry times — but it’s dry.

Cameron: Yeah, the state is dry from the north end all the way to the south. We’ve had record-low rainfall, and reservoir levels are unbelievably low to where the state [water] allocation for farmers is 5% of normal and the federal water allocation is actually zero. So there are a lot of empty fields that aren’t being planted — something I’ve never seen before. We’re seeing a lot of the almonds that have been planted over the years being taken out just because of the lack of water. I know in Northern California, there’s normally a 500,000 acres of rice, and we know that 270,000 to 300,000 acres will not be produced this year. So what we’re seeing is issues with, I think, food security and a lack of the things that you’re used to seeing on the grocery shelves in the future — they may be a little tougher to find.

Brancaccio: You worked on projects to, for instance, try to hold on to floodwaters when the floods come. But I haven’t seen many floods.

Cameron: No. We had flood water in 2017 and 2019, both big rainfall years. But we’re now in the third year of a really severe drought. We have the infrastructure in place for when it does flood, and I’m sure it will flood again in California, but currently it is just bone dry. In some of the water districts nearby many growers are taking the almonds out. We’re seeing lower prices due to the fact that we can’t get them through the ports and can’t get them exported. So we really have a bottleneck trying to move product out of the area, and the water situation just adds up to a really tough situation for growers.

Brancaccio: And you’ve got supply chain bottlenecks in both directions, right? It’d be nice to get your crops out to market, but also, what’s the story I’m hearing about you tried to buy a pickup truck — even that was hard?

Cameron: Yeah, we go through trucks on a regular basis, and we have a program where we try to replace a few each year, and we’re still waiting for the one we had to order about three months ago. So the supply chain has been difficult. Getting parts for the equipment that we have has been slow and really difficult to get at times.

Brancaccio: So I’m probably paying more for a tomato, then, on my end?

Cameron: Yeah. We grow a lot of processing tomatoes here, and for 2022 our price increased 25% — and our growers are saying that even at that, they’re barely making it with all the increases in prices that they’ve seen. And we anticipate another increase for the 2023 crop. So we’re already thinking about next year and what we’re going to grow, how we’re gonna grow it and how much we’ll be paid.

The last time the Rams played a game at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, things worked out pretty well for them, as they won Super Bowl LVI against the Cincinnati Bengals.

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Their 2022 home opener to the regular season went very differently, as the champs fell to the Bills 31-10.

Bills QB Josh Allen delivered a signature offensive performance in the win, throwing for three touchdowns with 297 total passing yards and an 83% CMP%, also adding a fourth TD on the ground to go with 56 rush yards.

While getting it done on offense with his arm and his legs is nothing new for Allen, occasionally he’ll extend an arm to hold a defender at bay and to extend the play to try to gain more yardage.

At 6’5 and 237 lb, he’s a big boy and hard to tackle, and it’s not uncommon on his runs that a defender finds themself on the receiving end of a stiff arm.

The latest recipient of a Josh Allen stiff arm is Rams safety Nick Scott.

The Buffalo Bills QB dropped back to pass while staring down a third-and-7 during the team’s opening offensive drive, when he took off towards the sideline for the first down, finding himself in a one-on-one matchup with Scott who came to meet him and try and make a tackle — who in turn then found himself on the wrong end of an Allen stiff arm that shoved him down on the turf.

After the game, Allen spoke about the play and how it fired up his team.

“Just trying to make a play for the team, just doing what I can do to try to get first down,” Allen said to the media. “That’s it. You know, guys appreciate that. I play hard. I want to win games no matter how I can do it. That’s just, I guess, an example of what I’m willing to do to win a game and just try to get a first down and allow us to keep moving the ball. It’s just all in the heat of the moment and I think guys appreciate that.”

After the game, Bills running back Devin Singletary confirmed something that could be seen in some angles of the stiff arm play- Which is Allen smiling and laughing while putting the outsized Scott on the ground.

A different angle and view of the Josh Allen stiff arm seen around the world, from @BWipp! #BillsMafia pic.twitter.com/tcSu5b0prL

— Sal Capaccio (@SalSports) September 10, 2022

“Of course,” Singletary said to Spectrum News 1 Buffalo reporter Jon Scott when asked if it provided the team with a jolt. “And while he’s doing it he’s laughing, so that’s going to turn you up even more. Yes, he’s laughing as he’s doing it, I’m watching him laugh as he’s doing it.”

Needless to say the Rams sideline may not have enjoyed it as much as the Bills as Allen and Scott came crashing into their area.

“They weren’t too happy about it, but it is what it is, they got to deal with it,” the RB said with a smile.

Allen is aggressive at the quarterback position in his playmaking abilities and in his desire to win games and advance offensive drives when carrying the ball. That can sometimes include trucking guys on the opposite side of the ball by laying an extended hand on them.

“I like winning. Whatever I’m asked to do, I’m willing to do,” Allen said of his running. “And again, limiting the hits, obviously sliding getting out of bounds. The utmost importance there, the best ability is availability. But again, when I’m called upon to do something for my team, I’m willing to do it.”

A native of Firebaugh, CA outside of Fresno, Allen had his family present watching from one of the SoFi stadium fieldside suites. The performance on one of the NFL’s newest and grandest fields made quite an impression.

“There have been a lot of great moments,” his father Joel said, via Sam Farmer and the Los Angeles Times. “But this is epic.”

California high schools have churned out some of the best players in the NFL. Whether it's Tom Brady (Junipero Serra), Aaron Rodgers (Pleasant Valley), or Josh Allen (Firebaugh), the state's high schools have tended to produce some of the best QB talent in the league.

Allen will be back in California on Thursday for the 2022 NFL season opener facing the defending Super Bowl champion Rams. He and the Bills will kick off what they hope will be a Super Bowl campaign of their own. Allen, listed by Caesars Sportsbook as the favorite for league MVP at +700, is coming off an AFC divisional round loss to the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes.

He seemingly came from out of nowhere after playing at Firebaugh High and Reedley College, a junior college. He asked every FBS coach for a roster spot but received just two offers: from Wyoming and Eastern Michigan. And EMU would eventually rescind its offer.

At Wyoming, Allen became a force his junior and senior seasons, throwing for 5,015 yards and 44 touchdowns (albeit on 56.1 percent passing). What didn't show up in the box score was Allen's arm strength and the plays he would create for himself and the Cowboys, who lost the Poinsettia Bowl in 2016 and won the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl in 2017.

Where did Josh Allen go to high school?

Allen went to Firebaugh High School in Firebaugh, Calif., which is about 50 minutes outside Fresno and two hours from San Jose.

He threw for 3,061 yards and 33 touchdowns to five interceptions as a senior, although even then he was hardly the most accurate passer at 57.4 percent. Where he shined was through the strength of his arm.

That arm strength remained an asset, but he has fine-tuned his accuracy over the years. After completing 52.8 percent and 58.8 percent in his rookie and second seasons, respectively, Allen has completed 69.2 percent and 63.3 percent in his third and fourth seasons to get up to 62.2 percent for his career.

If Allen can continue to hone that part of his game, he'll only make the Bills' offense better. His average intended air yards of 8.6 in 2021 were seventh in the league, and he averaged 8.8 intended air yards in 2020.

FANTASY: Josh Allen vs. Justin Herbert vs. Patrick Mahomes: Who should you draft first?

Allen has maintained his California roots despite his successes in Wyoming and Western New York. Last October, he wore a Firebaugh hoodie ahead of a Bills game against the Texans. Bills fans clamored to know where they could find one. The Bills and Firebaugh paired up for a limited sale of the sweatshirt. They sold $90,000 worth before Allen tossed in enough to make it an even $100,000. The money went to helping the school's students.

Allen's true homecoming would have come in 2020, when the Bills played the 49ers. But the game was moved from Santa Clara to Arizona. His upcoming bout in Inglewood vs. the Rams will be his first game in California with fans. Perhaps he'll see some friends and family in the hostile crowd.

Updated August 22, 2022 at 9:28 AM ET

Firebaugh, Calif., sitting right on the San Joaquin River, is a great place to raise a family, says city manager Ben Gallegos. He's lived in this Central Valley community for most of his life.

But now he's preparing the city for a force of nature potentially more destructive than the fires and drought Californians are used to — a megastorm.

They form out at sea as plumes of water vapor thousands of miles long. As they reach land, they dump rain and snow for weeks at a time, causing devastating flooding.

The last megastorm to hit the West Coast was the Great Flood of 1862. It temporarily turned much of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys into a giant inland sea, 300 miles long.

Gallegos is in no doubt about what a megastorm would mean for Firebaugh.

"A lot of water. Flooding for many days. [A] potential hazard to really wiping out the city," he told NPR's Leila Fadel.

Climate scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles say that climate change will increase the frequency of these megastorms.

While they used to occur every 100-200 years on average, rising temperatures mean we'll now see them as often as every 50 years.

Xingying Huang and Daniel Swain, who co-authored the research, say a megastorm could mean millions of people displaced by flooding, major transportation links severed, and damage totaling nearly $1 trillion.

Gallegos is worried that bigger cities will be the focus of flood-prevention spending before a megastorm, rather than his city of around 8,500 people.

"You think about San Francisco, Los Angeles. Is the state really going to say — or the feds — let me give Firebaugh $50 to $60 million to upgrade the levee, or should we give it to somebody else?" he said. "They say, 'Oh if we lose that town, what impact is it going to have to the state?' Well, it's going to have a lot of impact to the state."

Firebaugh is an agricultural community, growing tomatoes that are processed into sauces for the restaurant industry. Farmers also grow cantaloupes. Gallegos says the loss of those businesses would have a knock-on impact on California's economy.

Residents of Firebaugh are worried by the prospect of a megastorm hitting, especially after a previous evacuation due to a flood in 1997 didn't go well.

"The city wasn't prepared at that time for an evacuation. They evacuated all the residents to our community center. But the community center was right next to the river, so there was a levee that was washing out," Gallegos said. "So they went and sent them out to our neighboring cities. But those cities were not ready for our residents, so then they had to get them back. And then they put them up in a warehouse just west of the city."

Gallegos knows that state and federal officials have a choice: Pay for flood prevention measures now, or pay much, much more later to help Firebaugh recover from a megastorm.

"We need help. I always tell our leaders, we can fix it now, which would cost less than when we have an emergency, and you have people trying to fix it, which would cost a lot more than being proactive," he said.

If nothing is done, the alternative doesn't bear thinking about for Gallegos, he said.

"I think Firebaugh would be wiped out."

The audio for this story was produced by Chad Campbell and edited by Simone Popperl and Adam Bearne.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

California, where earthquakes, droughts and wildfires have shaped life for generations, also faces the growing threat of another kind of calamity, one whose fury would be felt across the entire state.

This one will come from the sky.

According to new research, it will very likely take shape one winter in the Pacific, near Hawaii. No one knows exactly when, but from the vast expanse of tropical air around the Equator, atmospheric currents will pluck out a long tendril of water vapor and funnel it toward the West Coast. This vapor plume will be enormous, hundreds of miles wide and more than 1,200 miles long, and seething with ferocious winds. It will be carrying so much water that if you converted it all to liquid, its flow would be about 26 times what the Mississippi River discharges into the Gulf of Mexico at any given moment.

When this torpedo of moisture reaches California, it will crash into the mountains and be forced upward. This will cool its payload of vapor and kick off weeks and waves of rain and snow.

The superstorm that Californians have long feared will have begun. In centuries past, great rains deluged the Pacific coast, and strong storms in recent decades have caused havoc and ruin. But, because of climate change, this one would be worse than any in living memory.

Drenching rain will pummel cities and towns. At times, the hills around Los Angeles could get nearly 2 inches of rain an hour. Heavy rain and snow in the Sierra Nevada will test dams in the Central Valley, one of the world’s most productive farm belts.

While all this has been happening, another filament of moisture-laden air will have formed over the Pacific and begun hurtling toward California. Then another. And another.

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After a month, nearly 16 inches of precipitation, on average, will have fallen across the state. Large swaths of mountainous areas will have gotten much more. Communities might be ravaged beyond resettling. None of the state’s major industries, from tech and Hollywood to farming and oil, will be untouched.

The coming superstorm — really, a rapid procession of what scientists call atmospheric rivers — will be the ultimate test of the dams, levees and bypasses California has built to impound nature’s might.

But in a state where scarcity of water has long been the central fact of existence, global warming is not only worsening droughts and wildfires. Because warmer air can hold more moisture, atmospheric rivers can carry bigger cargoes of precipitation. The infrastructure design standards, hazard maps and disaster response plans that protected California from flooding in the past might soon be out of date.

As humans burn fossil fuels and heat up the planet, we have already increased the chances each year that California will experience a monthlong, statewide megastorm of this severity to roughly 1 in 50, according to a new study published Friday. In the coming decades, if global average temperatures climb by another 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Celsius — and current trends suggest they might — then the likelihood of such storms will go up further, to nearly 1 in 30.

At the same time, the risk of megastorms that are rarer but even stronger, with much fiercer downpours, will rise as well.

These are alarming possibilities. But geological evidence suggests the West has been struck by cataclysmic floods several times over the past millennium, and the new study provides the most advanced look yet at how this threat is evolving in the age of human-caused global warming.

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“We got kind of lucky to avoid it in the 20th century,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who prepared the new study with Xingying Huang of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “I would be very surprised to avoid it occurring in the 21st.”

Donald G. Sullivan was lying in bed one night, early in his career as a scientist, when he realized his data might hold a startling secret.

For his master’s research at the University of California, Berkeley, he had sampled the sediment beneath a remote Sierra lake and was hoping to study the history of vegetation in the area. But a lot of the pollen in his sediment cores didn’t seem to be from nearby. How had it gotten there?

When he X-rayed the cores, he found layers where the sediment was denser. Maybe, he surmised, these layers were filled with sand and silt that had washed in during floods.

It was only late that night that he tried to estimate the ages of the layers. They lined up neatly with other records of West Coast megafloods.

“That’s when it clicked,” said Sullivan, who is now at the University of Denver.

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His findings, from 1982, showed that major floods hadn’t been exceptionally rare occurrences in the Sacramento Valley over the past eight centuries. They took place every 100 to 200 years. And in the decades since, advancements in modeling have helped scientists evaluate how quickly the risks are rising because of climate change.

For their new study, Huang and Swain replayed portions of the 20th and 21st centuries using 40 simulations of the global climate. Extreme weather events, by definition, don’t occur very often. So by using computer models to create realistic alternate histories of the past, present and future climate, scientists can study a longer record of events than the real world offers.

Swain and Huang looked at all the monthlong California storms that took place during two time segments in the simulations, one in the recent past and the other in a future with high global warming. They then used a weather model to produce detailed play-by-plays of where and when the storms dump their water.

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Those details matter. There are “so many different factors” that make an atmospheric river deadly or benign, Huang said.

Climate change might be affecting atmospheric rivers in other ways, too, said F. Martin Ralph of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. How strong their winds are, for instance, or how long they last.

Scientists are also working to improve atmospheric river forecasts, which is no easy task as the West experiences increasingly sharp shifts from very dry conditions to very wet and back again.

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“My scientific gut says there’s change happening,” Ralph said. “And we just haven’t quite pinned down how to detect it adequately.”

How do you protect a place as vast as California from a colossal storm? Two ways, said David Peterson, a veteran engineer. Change where the water goes, or change where the people are. Ideally, both. But neither is easy.

Firebaugh is a quiet, mostly Hispanic city of 8,100 people, one of many small communities that power the Central Valley’s prodigious agricultural economy. Firebaugh also sits right on the San Joaquin River.

For a sleepless stretch of early 2017, Ben Gallegos, Firebaugh’s city manager, did little but watch the river rise and debate whether to evacuate half the town. Water was threatening homes, schools, churches and the wastewater treatment plant.

Luckily, the river stopped rising. Still, the experience led Gallegos to apply for tens of millions in funding for new and improved levees around Firebaugh.

Levees change where the water goes, giving rivers more room to swell before they inundate the land. Levee failures in New Orleans were what turned Katrina into an epochal catastrophe, and after that storm, California toughened levee standards in urbanized areas of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys.

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But the plodding pace of work has set people on edge. At a recent public hearing in Stockton on flood risk, Elias stood up and highlighted some troubling math.

The Department of Water Resources says up to $30 billion in investment is needed over the next 30 years. Yet over the past 15 years, the state managed to spend only $3.5 billion.

“We have to find ways to get ahead of the curve,” Elias said. “We don’t want to have a Katrina 2.0 play out right here in the heart of Stockton.”

This story was originally published at nytimes.com. Read it here.