Some farmers are watching and waiting to see how their fruit and nut trees handle ground that is soaked by water, but some said they have seen this before.
Richard Taylor has prune and walnut trees in standing water adjacent to the Feather River levee in his Taylor Brothers Farms in Yuba City. He says too much water seeping through can kill young walnut and peach trees.
"In 1955, when the levee broke, where we are right now was about 10 feet of water, it laid in here and stayed in here and didn't drain and it killed all the orchards," Taylor says.
Taylor says farmers sued the State of California for not breaching a Feather River levee downstream to let the water out. He says the farmers eventually won but received only about one-third of the value of the crops that were lost.
He recently moved about 1,200 tons of prunes to a packing plant up north and about $1 million worth of farm equipment to higher ground.
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