Rain ruins some Bay Area strawberries, but lays foundation for another bumper crop

DAVENPORT, Santa Cruz County -- The rain has moved on but it has left a lot of work for some Bay Area farmers. Strawberries, while delicious, are notoriously vulnerable to heavy rainfalls. So how did they fare with the region's small September storm?

"Right there," said Jim Cochran, founder of Swanton Berry Farm. "Do you see that little darkening of the color, and the skin is not shiny?"

Across 24 acres of organic Strawberries, Cochran is surveying the damage.

"I can see the skin is sort of recessed and the seeds are protruding," Cochran said examining a strawberry. "That's where the skin has been injured by the physical droplets of water."

"Good," he said after tasting one. "A little watery, because it has been rained on. But in two days it won't be. It was clear we were going to need to be very selective about what we send to the stores."

And so there are losses. The damaged berries are squashed on site.

"We will still be throwing a lot of food away the rest of this week," Cochran said of the rain damage.

But there's good news as well. This field is going to get a chance to dry out. So the land and the reservoirs get the benefit of the rain, and these plants will thrive if they don't stay too soggy.

"What you'll notice is that there's flowers, which means strawberries in 28 days from now," Cochran said. "There's a continuous crop of strawberries."

It helps that this area is in a bit of a "Goldilocks" zone.

"It almost never freezes here," he said. "Almost never gets above 80 degrees either, so it's an ideal spot."

What could end the season for local farmers is a winter like California needs.

"Getting rain continuously makes it very difficult to get any crop out of it," said of winter storms.

So storms every couple of weeks are, maybe, a washout for the year. But one storm like what we saw on Sunday is probably just a hit.

"In this particular case we had one and a half days of rain," Cochran said. "And the next two weeks are gonna be beautiful."