Tulare Farm Bureau: One Year Later

2023’s severe weather left west coast producers reeling, with some still standing ankle-deep in last year’s flood waters. Tulare County Farm Bureau’s Executive Director joins us, here’s Tricia Stever Blattler.

“January and March of 2023 both presented a really big amount of rainfall, much more than we had seen in a number of years. And coming out of that drought period, there was a lot of cautious optimism of wanting to see a big heavy rain. But as we got into the middle of March, we really had some very long sustained rain periods over several days that, unfortunately, our local infrastructure was not prepared to handle. So, a lot of our east side Foothill community saw the brunt of that watershed. Our controlled waterways, like the dam at Lake Cahuilla, the dam at Success Lake out of Porterville, they were fine. They held back the appropriate amount of water. They did some scheduled releases, but we had a lot of uncontrolled waterways.”