In California’s Central Valley, the heart of America’s agricultural powerhouse, the rhythms of harvest have been thrown into chaos. For farmworkers like Lorena Pérez Guzmán, a single mother of two, the 2025 season has been marked by uncertainty, vanishing jobs, and skyrocketing costs at the grocery store. “They just tore them out and no one knows why,” Guzmán said of the wine grape vines she once worked, describing a season segmented by frantic searches for work and weeks spent scrambling to make ends meet. According to Stocktonia, the cherry crop was the worst in decades, the walnut harvest was interrupted by rats, and even the reliable wine grape fields were decimated.
This is not just a story about bad luck. It’s the result of a perfect storm: climate change, economic pressures, and a wave of immigration enforcement policies that have reshaped the agricultural landscape and the lives of those who work it. The Central Valley, home to half a million field workers and a $50 billion agricultural industry that supplies a quarter of the nation’s food, is facing a crisis with far-reaching consequences.
Food prices, already a source of stress for most Americans, are rising at their fastest pace in three years. According to CNN and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, food prices jumped 0.6% in August 2025 from the previous month, and are up 2.7% from a year ago. For families like Guzmán’s, that means a grocery bill that used to be $100 is now four or five times higher. “And we’re not talking about eating super well— we have to stretch to make it work,” she told Stocktonia.
Behind these numbers are dramatic changes in the fields. The cherry yield in the Central Valley fell by 50% in 2025, representing a $100 million loss in San Joaquin County alone. The California Department of Agriculture stepped in, purchasing $3 million worth of dried cherries from devastated farmers. But climate change wasn’t done. Torrential rains prevented pollination of cherry trees, a warm winter confused the peach trees, and even green grapes were infected with a white, cottony mold. “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,” said María Zuñiga, a farmworker with 11 years’ experience. “The peaches were all green. So some days there would be work, and some days not. Then when it did mature, it was really watery, so it was a big blow.”
Climate disruptions have also made the work more dangerous. Between 2018 and 2022, 83 farmworkers in California died on the job when temperatures exceeded 80 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Stocktonia. In recent years, summer temperatures in the Central Valley have regularly spiked near 100 degrees, making an already grueling job even more perilous.
But weather is only part of the story. Economic pressures—some of them the result of federal policy—have battered the region. The wine grape market, once a mainstay of the San Joaquin Valley, collapsed due to declining U.S. wine consumption and the Trump administration’s tariff policies. In 2024, vineyard owners left 350,000 tons of grapes to die on the vine, and this year, some simply tore out their plants. “We planted almonds instead, but there wasn’t a crop,” said Adam Mettler, a Lodi farm manager, who told Stocktonia that his farm lost 50% of its income. Tariffs have also hit almond growers hard, with the industry losing $875 million in exports to Canada and China.
For the workers, this means fewer jobs and lower pay. Some, like Estéban, a tractor driver who asked Stocktonia not to use his last name because he is undocumented, are working double shifts at multiple sites just to get by. Others, like Noé Gutiérrez, have found no work at all this season. “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,” Gutiérrez said. “And then because of the heat, a lot of jobs are not hiring anyone at all right now.”
Layered atop these hardships is a growing culture of fear among farmworkers—documented and undocumented alike—spurred by the administration’s mass detention and deportation agenda. Since January 2025, 1.2 million foreign-born workers have left the U.S. labor force, and agricultural employment dropped 6.5% from March to July, a loss of about 155,000 workers, according to CNN. In some regions, as many as 75% of farmworkers lack legal immigration status. As a result, labor shortages have left crops unharvested, pushing prices even higher at the supermarket.
“Even though nearly two months have passed since then, a little more than half of my workforce has come back,” said Robby Robertson, a construction superintendent in Alabama, describing the aftermath of immigration raids in Florida to Common Dreams. The construction industry, like agriculture, depends heavily on immigrant labor, and both are now facing worker shortages that drive up costs for everyone—housing included.
The massive federal response has been costly. In the summer of 2025, Congress allocated $170 billion to immigration enforcement, making ICE the highest-funded law enforcement agency in U.S. history, outstripping the FBI, DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined, as reported by MSNBC. That sum, critics note, could have built 7,000 new elementary schools or fed the nation’s schoolchildren for a decade. Instead, it’s fueling deportation flights and detention operations, even as a government shutdown threatens to suspend essential services for American families.
For farmworkers, the fear is palpable. María Consuelo Gutiérrez, a former fieldworker now living on disability, worries that if she’s arrested by ICE, agents won’t believe her green card is real and she’ll be separated from her ventilator. “I don’t leave the house, except to go to the doctor,” she told Stocktonia. Even those with legal status, like Guzmán, are afraid to visit family in Mexico, worried they won’t be allowed back.
Children, too, are feeling the strain. According to José Rodríguez of El Concilio, a local advocacy group, “You see more folks only coming out in the evening after hours because they believe that ICE is only enforcing from 8 to 5.” The anxiety is so high that some families debate whether to self-deport or wait until they’re forcibly removed. “It’s just a matter of time before it comes to our community given the amount of money that’s been directed towards ICE enforcement,” Rodríguez said.
Despite these challenges, most farmworkers say leaving is not an option. “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,” Guzmán said, her voice heavy with hope and worry.
As the Central Valley’s harvests shrink and laborers dwindle, the ripple effects are felt far beyond the fields. From supermarket sticker shock to national debates over immigration and climate, the fate of America’s farmworkers is shaping the future for everyone who sits down to dinner.
