CA farmers feeling impact of Arizona E. coli outbreak

It’s not just the romaine lettuce from Yuma that has been tainted, but the name “romaine” itself. It’s been a hard-sell for farmers here on the Central Coast, despite having nothing to do with the E. coli outbreak.

“Monterey County has never been the source of these outbreaks but it affects commodities,” said Monterey County Assistant Agricultural Commissioner Bob Roach.

The E. Coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce happened more than 500 miles away, and yet Monterey County farmers are feeling the impact.

“Once it gets in the consumers mind that a product is associated with illness or death, they tend to avoid that product for a while,” Roach.

And so farmers have to adjust.

“This field in back of us was in romaine lettuce a few weeks ago. And they harvest about two-thirds of it. Then the last third of the field just got wasted because there is no market for it,” said Roach.

According to produce price index, since the outbreak, the price farmers are paid for a head of romaine dropped from 70-cents to 30-cents.

“It’s difficult to predict where the market is going to go for romaine in the future, but if we look back at the spinach outbreak in 2006/2007. Those values did not recover for years,” said Roach.

Romaine lettuce is a 500-million dollar crop in Monterey County, however like any good salad, there’s variety on the Central Coast.

“In a four-plus billion dollar agricultural economy, we probably won’t see an overall dip because we have such diversity in our agricultural products. That provides protection against economic shocks,” said Roach.

Unfortunately when something like this happens, there’s no crop insurance or financial assistance to help farmers out. It really is just a bad situation where they’ll have to keep an eye on prices, hoping for them to rebound. The annual crop report for 2017 will be released on June 26th.