LODI — Year after year, predictable harvest cycles of fruits and nuts meant Lorena Pérez Guzmán, a farmworker in this Central Valley city, could put food on the table as a single mother of two. This year, she says, there’s no work.
It all happened at once: The cherry crop was the worst in decades, the walnut harvest was interrupted by rats, and when she got to the wine grape vineyard, Guzmán said, half the plants were gone. “They just tore them out and no one knows why,” she said.
Instead of the usual shifting of the crop cycle, this season has been segmented by periods of frantic searching. She’ll work in the fields, then scramble for weeks to find the next job.
To make matters worse, the cost of groceries rose, Guzmán said, to four or five times the expected price, leaving Guzmán and her two teenage children to get by with less.
In the Central Valley — where half a million people work in the fields, supporting a 50 billion dollar agricultural industry that supplies a quarter of the nation’s food — failing crops have put some career farmworkers out of a job, while others hustle to claim the remaining spots.
But for fieldworkers like Guzmán, an immigrant from Mexico with legal U.S. residency, weak harvests are just one piece of this year’s challenges.
On top of climate-driven weather transformations, which have damaged numerous crops, the agricultural industry in the Central Valley has been hammered by an array of economic pressures, including a national decline in wine consumption and the rise of President Donald Trump’s tariff policies.
Adding to an already tense environment is a new culture of fear for farmworkers who are almost universally immigrants. Whether or not they have legal status to work in the U.S, they’re now uncertain if sweeping raids by immigration agents will land them in prison or disrupt their lives.
Climate change
Climate change is unavoidable in Lodi, Guzmán says, as this year’s harvests seem to last “just a couple of weeks.” In the San Joaquin Valley, rare torrential rains prevented pollination of the cherry trees, a warm winter confused the peach trees, and even some of the green grapes, Guzmán said, are infected with white, cottony mold that spreads down the rows.
María Zuñiga, who has harvested fruit in the Central Valley for 11 years, said she began to see the transformation last year. The effects of climate change, notably extreme and unusual weather patterns, threw off the plants’ natural rhythms, setting this harvest season up for failure. The cherry yield fell by 50% in the Central Valley, representing a 100 million dollar loss in San Joaquin County alone. The county declared an emergency and the California Department of Agriculture stepped in, purchasing $3 million worth of dried cherries from devastated farmers.
Grape-picking at a Lodi farm in September. Farmers say fruit isn’t always worth the money it costs to harvest it. (Photos by Annie Barker/Stocktonia/CatchLight Local/Report for America)
“Now with the climate, everything crashed, so there are times when I need to halt my life for one or two weeks to look for other work,” Zuñiga said. “We just finished the peach [season], and it didn’t mature. The peaches were all green. So some days there would be work, and some days not. Then when it [the peach crop] did mature, it was really watery, so it was a big blow.”
Sometimes, changing weather impacts farmworkers even more directly. Between 2018 and 2022, 83 farmworkers in California died on the job when temperatures were above 80 degrees, the threshold where, by state law, employers are required to provide adequate shade, water, and rest to workers. In the Central Valley over the past few years, summer temperatures have regularly spiked near 100 degrees.
At the same time, rising costs that have hit budgets nationwide also put pressure on farming paychecks. Guzmán, the mother of two teens, remembers a load of groceries used to cost $100. “Now it’s more like four or five,” she said. “And we’re not talking about eating super well— we have to stretch to make it work.”
Economic pressures
In addition to climate change, changing tastes have diminished the wine grape market, one of the San Joaquin Valley’s most prominent crops — in the 2024 harvest season, vineyard owners left an estimated 350,000 tons of grapes to die on the vine. This year, some just ripped out the plants completely.
Adam Mettler, who assists in managing his family’s farm in Lodi, took the falling demand for grapes as a sign he should switch gears. “We planted almonds instead, but there wasn’t a crop,” he said. This year, Mettler says the demand for wine grapes is the worst it’s been in 70 years and the farm has lost 50% of its income.
Estéban, a farmworker who drives a tractor in a grape vineyard who did not want to share his last name because he is undocumented and worries about being deported, said he is working multiple jobs to make ends meet, a departure from the other 15 years he has harvested fruit in San Joaquin County. “I work double shifts,” he says, “a little here, a little there, in different places.”
Harvesting grapes means waking up before dawn. The workers, in muddy boots, long sleeves, headlamps, and hats, wield knives strapped to their wrists, which they use to drop bunches of grapes into square, plastic boxes at lightning speed, undressing a vine in just a few seconds. They are paid by the 38-pound box, but the price, like the price of a ton of Zinfandel grapes, changes daily. Oscar Hernández, a migrant worker in the Lodi grape vines, said, as he bent under the branches, that he couldn’t estimate at all how much he would be paid that day.
Agriculture workers say a combination of factors throws their livelihoods into doubt. (Photos by Annie Barker/Stocktonia/CatchLight Local/Report for America)
For some migrant workers, like Noé Gutiérrez, there has been no work this season at all. Gutiérrez’s son, who also works in the fields, is now the sole breadwinner and the family is cutting costs to survive until Gutiérrez is reemployed. “At the place where I used to work, a cannery, they’re also paying people less, minimum wage, $16.50 an hour, when it used to be 20 or 21,” he said. “And then because of the heat, (a lot of jobs) are not hiring anyone at all right now.”
Gutiérrez blames his woes this year on the Trump administration, specifically Trump’s economic policies. “Trump was a good guy when he was President the first time— he gave us money,” Gutiérrez said, referring to the COVID-era stimulus checks, which Gutiérrez received, because he is a naturalized citizen. “A lot of people thought that it would be the same, but now he has shown the other side of his face.”
Because of the Trump administration’s tariff policies, certain crops are no longer exported overseas, especially to Canadian and Chinese markets, lowering demand and cutting jobs. Due to retaliatory tariffs in Trump’s first term, for example, the almond industry lost $875 million dollars. Gutiérrez and Zuñiga say some farmers have left fruit to die on the trees this year, because it will never be sold, so there is no budget to hire people to harvest it.
Immigration fears
The other side effect of Trump administration policies in the Central Valley is a culture of fear, as farmworkers of all legal statuses worry about potential ICE raids. María Consuelo Gutiérrez, a former farm worker who is now living off of disability benefits because she has lung disease, says she worries if she is arrested by an ICE officer, the agent will not believe that her green card is real, and she will be separated from her ventilator.
If she doesn’t plug into the machine every couple of hours, Gutiérrez risks death.
“I don’t leave the house, except to go to the doctor,” she said.
According to representatives of El Concilio, a local immigrant advocacy organization, ICE agents have sat outside medical clinics in nearby Stockton in recent months, though not arresting anyone, so far as El Concilio knows, just making their presence known.
Guzmán, also a legal resident, is worried about changes to immigration law as well. She has heard rumors that if she returns to Mexico when the harvest is over to visit her parents, she won’t be able to come back, because agents at the border will discard her residency papers.
Those who are most at risk are not necessarily those who are most afraid of immigration enforcement. Hernández, who is undocumented, says he prefers not to think about the threat of an ICE raid. This is his first season in the United States, and it took him five days of travel to arrive here from Mexico. “If I don’t think about it, then it won’t happen,” he said.
Estéban, one of the leaders of the team working on that vineyard, says he has accepted the possibility ICE might come for him, even if he is taking every precaution to make himself invisible. “If they get me they get me,” he said. “My children are already grown.”
According to El Concilio, the atmosphere of fear among undocumented families in farmworker communities has led to serious mental health effects in small children, who are terrified their parents will disappear, part of a wide range of changes in the immigrant community since Trump’s inauguration. “You see more folks [only] coming out in the evening after hours because they believe that ICE is only enforcing from 8 to 5,” José Rodríguez, El Concilio’s Director said.
On June 12, the Trump administration issued a directive to local ICE offices, asking them to halt raids at farms, restaurants, and hotels, after successful lobbying from leaders in the agriculture and hospitality industries. Then, on June 16, Trump abruptly canceled the new rule.
Farmers have done little to protect their employees, workers say, keeping themselves at a distance.
“I don’t know the guys picking,” Mettler said, adding that the farm hires a contracting company to find workers, and he doesn’t know how many people are enlisted to join the harvest. Mettler stood just a few feet from the crew, observing as they shouted orders in Spanish, filling buckets with grapes and moving down the rows. He said he did not know how much the workers are paid, or whether his decision to replace grapes with almonds had affected the workforce this year.
Goats munch on dry grass, left, while vineyards wait for the wine press. The wine crop is one of the region’s most valuable, but declining wine sales have left both growers and field workers with less to go around. (Photos by Annie Barker/Stocktonia/CatchLight Local/Report for America)
Farmworkers like Gutiérrez, Guzmán, and Zuñiga say giving up their work and returning to Mexico is not an option, even though manual labor jobs have become more difficult to find in the U.S. They say they want to avoid violence, separating their families, and forcing their children to acclimate to a new school system.
“It’s just a matter of time before it [an ICE raid] comes to our community given the amount of money that’s been directed towards ICE enforcement… a lot of families are living with the anxiety of the decision of whether they should self-deport now and leave on their own free will or whether they should wait till something happens,” Rodríguez said. “But if I ride out the storm and leave for a short period of time and then I come back, will I still find things in place?”
“Sometimes I think ‘OK, let’s go [to Mexico],’” Guzmán said in an interview in her home after returning from a morning picking grapes. “But I want my daughters to stay here in school. I don’t want them to end up working in the fields like I do.”
Lillian Perlmutter covers immigration for Times of San Diego and NEWSWELL.
