When the river water gushed through a broken damthousands of people in a Californian farming town were forced to evacuate as their homes were flooded and businesses destroyed.

Another potential casualty of the heavy rains that have inundated coastal California: hundreds of acres of fresh strawberries lined American supermarket shelves this summer.

Industry experts estimated about a fifth of strawberry farms in the Watsonville and Salinas areas were flooded after a levee broke late Friday about 70 miles (110 kilometers) south of San Francisco and another river overflowed. It’s too early to know if the berry plants can recover, but the longer they remain under water, the more difficult the task may become, said Jeff Cardinale, a spokesman for the California Strawberry Commission.

“When the water recedes, what does the field look like—if it’s even a field?” – said the Cardinal. “It could just be a dirty mess with nothing left.”

For years, California farmers have been plagued by drought and water battles as key sources dry up. But so far this winter, the nation’s most populous state — and the nation’s main source of food — has suffered from 11 atmospheric rivers as well as the powerful storms caused by arctic air that produced blizzard conditions in the mountains.

Many communities are coping with heavy downpours and flooding, including the unincorporated community of Pahara, known for its strawberry crops. The nearby Pahara River swelled with runoff from rains last week and a levee — built in the 1940s to protect against flooding and a known hazard for decades — broke, forcing the evacuation of more than 8,000 people from the mostly Latino farming community.

Farm workers have had their hours reduced or cut entirely because of the storms, said Antonio De Loero-Brust, a spokesman for the United Farm Workers. According to him, the most important issue is helping to rebuild the Pahara community.

The vast majority of strawberries grown in the United States come from California, and farms in different regions of the state harvest the berries at different times of the year. According to the commission, about a third of the state’s strawberry acreage is in the Watsonville and Salinas areas.

Peter Navarro grows strawberries, raspberries and blackberries on a farm by the Pahara River. He said he was lucky his fields were not flooded by the levee breach, but still expects his harvest to be delayed for several weeks by the rainy, cold weather.

After planting the berries last year, Navarro said he and other farmers are concerned that water sources are drying up because of the prolonged drought.

“When the rain started, we were excited, happy, saying, ‘This is what we need, the rainy season,'” Navarro said. “We certainly did not expect all these atmospheric rivers. It just swamped us — and swamped the river.”

Other crops such as lettuce and other greens have also been affected by the floods in Pahara Valley. Some vegetables have already been planted, but many have not, and the storms could delay planting, said Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau.

“Right now, I think everybody’s trying to save the farm, so to speak,” Groot said, adding that more rain is in the forecast for the weekend.

Monterey County is home to Pajaro and the crop-rich Salinas Valley, as well as more than 360,000 acres of land, said Juan Hidalgo, the county’s agriculture commissioner. The county estimated $324 million in damage to the agricultural sector from January’s storms, and strawberries, raspberries and greens are likely to suffer, he said.

But, he added, there won’t be many acres of farmland, and consumers may not feel the effects of the storms. “We’re still going to have a lot of production,” he said.

The problem for strawberry growers is that the plants are already in the ground. Soren Bjorn, president of Driscoll’s of the Americas, said the company works with a network of independent growers to pack, ship and sell the strawberries. In the Pahara Valley, farmers planted last fall to get the berries into stores in the summer, when it’s too hot to grow the fruit further south, he said.

Now, farmers can’t even reach their fields because the roads are flooded. But with about 900 acres (364 hectares) under water in the Pajara Valley and another 600 acres (243 hectares) flooded in nearby Salinas, Bjorn said the potential impact is significant, especially as farmers not only face the problem of mud-soaked plants , but also damaged equipment.

In the height of summer, according to Bjorn, most of the strawberries in the country come from this region.

“It’s too early to know the full impact of this,” he said. “There’s no way we’re going to get what we planned.”