A surge in immigration enforcement across California's Central Valley over the past two weeks has stalled agricultural work in parts of the nation's top farming region, as some workers were detained and others stayed home, the Mid Valley Times reported on October 21.

"We are certainly seeing a dramatic uptick in activity over the last week or so," Heather Riden, program director at the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety, told the newspaper. "The level of stress in many of our agricultural communities is really high."

The clearest losses are in the orchards. Kevin Herman, owner of Madera-based The Specialty Crop Co., said the raids were causing about half of the roughly 100 workers hired to harvest figs in his orchards to miss work for more than a week, FreshPlaza reported in its summary of the same reporting. As a result, his farm could not ship its full volume of fresh-market figs to retailers across North America — on an order for five pallets of fruit, crews picked only two or three. Herman, who grows figs and other fruit in Fresno, Madera and Merced counties, said about 10 percent of his fig crop remained unharvested as citrus harvesting was about to begin.

In Firebaugh, Joe Del Bosque of Del Bosque Farms said a "handful" of workers did not report for cantaloupe harvesting after immigration agents were seen in the area, the Mid Valley Times reported. Melon harvesting needs about 20 trained people working in sequence — driving a tractor, identifying ripe melons, picking, packing and stacking boxes with a forklift. "These are skilled positions," Del Bosque said. "If they don't show up today, you can't just go out and look for somebody on the street to replace them."

Joe Garcia, president of the California Farmworker Foundation and owner of Delano-based Jaguar Farm Labor Contracting Inc., which employs about 3,000 people in the Central Valley and Central Coast, said he spent last week chasing one possible sighting of immigration agents after another. While he was not aware of agents entering any farm properties, he said arrests at supermarkets and roadsides — and a steady stream of unverified sightings online — sent "ripple effects" through the valley, with worker turnout in some crews plummeting. "There is heightened fear," Garcia said.

The enforcement wave behind the empty fields is the same October surge in which advocates counted more than 100 people detained within days in the Fresno area, according to KQED reporting summarized by Latina Lista, with the Valley Watch Network counting more than 70 arrests in the Fresno area in a single week, according to The Fresno Bee. Enforcement also ramped up in parts of Southern California, the Central Coast and the Sacramento Valley, community organizations told the Mid Valley Times. Giselle Garcia of Sacramento-based NorCal Resist said her rapid-response organization had met or spoken with nearly 20 newly detained people or their families since the prior week. The Department of Homeland Security declined to provide details about the duration or objectives of the operations, FreshPlaza reported. California grows more than a third of the country's vegetables and roughly three-quarters of its fruits and nuts, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture — which is why growers warn that a harvest slowed here is felt on store shelves far beyond the valley.