Valley Fever

[hurleyjd]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/potentially-deadly-valley-fever-hitting-california-farmworkers-hard-worrying-researchers-n1017806

Never heard of this. I have not worked in the valley but have been subjected to dusty conditions on the farm in east Texas. Also dusty conditions also out there in any agricultural operation.

 

[cow pollinater]

I grew up about two miles north of the white house in the picture with the hill. Valley fever doesn't have anything to do with race as the article implies. Us white kids that grew up following dad around on the farm and playing in the dirt contracted it early on and gained immunity while the immigrants that come to work in the area have no immunity. Seams like just about everyone that moves to the area as an adult winds up with a severe case of it, regardless of skin color.

 

[Cornfed01]

Stretches as far east as west Texas.

Not near as much California, but you can find it anywhere in between.

 

[hurleyjd]

I grew up about two miles north of the white house in the picture with the hill. Valley fever doesn't have anything to do with race as the article implies. Us white kids that grew up following dad around on the farm and playing in the dirt contracted it early on and gained immunity while the immigrants that come to work in the area have no immunity. Seams like just about everyone that moves to the area as an adult winds up with a severe case of it, regardless of skin color.

I am going to ask a question and hope it is not to political. Could the agricultural operations in the valley operate without migrant labor. Are we to dependent on migrant labor in all of our food production. Any thing that requires manual labor instead of running a mechanical harvester.
Several years ago I watched them picking up burlap bags of onions from the field. Looks as if the onions were placed in the bags to dry without the sun turning them green. The machine they were using looked like a combine with a person on each side grabbing the bags and emptying them onto a conveyor that carried the onions to a bin on the machine. This was in the Mojave desert outside of Lancaster.
Also I was amazed at the concrete canal that transported water from the north to the south. Looks like the water was not moving but it was moving faster that it looked.
Also some of the fields would not procuce any more because of salt left from irrgation water looked white with the salt deposits on it.

 

[M-5]

I grew up about two miles north of the white house in the picture with the hill. Valley fever doesn't have anything to do with race as the article implies. Us white kids that grew up following dad around on the farm and playing in the dirt contracted it early on and gained immunity while the immigrants that come to work in the area have no immunity. Seams like just about everyone that moves to the area as an adult winds up with a severe case of it, regardless of skin color.

I am going to ask a question and hope it is not to political. Could the agricultural operations in the valley operate without migrant labor. Are we to dependent on migrant labor in all of our food production. Any thing that requires manual labor instead of running a mechanical harvester.
Several years ago I watched them picking up burlap bags of onions from the field. Looks as if the onions were placed in the bags to dry without the sun turning them green. The machine they were using looked like a combine with a person on each side grabbing the bags and emptying them onto a conveyor that carried the onions to a bin on the machine. This was in the Mojave desert outside of Lancaster.
Also I was amazed at the concrete canal that transported water from the north to the south. Looks like the water was not moving but it was moving faster that it looked.
Also some of the fields would not procuce any more because of salt left from irrgation water looked white with the salt deposits on it.

GET RID OF WELFARE AND YOU WOULD HAVE PLENTY OF FOLKS THAT WOULD CHOOSE WORK OVER STARVATION ,.

 

[CottageFarm]

Sorry, but Valley fever has been around pretty much forever and has nothing to do with migrant labor, or food production, or climate change as the article wants to suggest. Its a fungus in the soil. Some years are worse than others, just like flues, and colds and pneumonia and..... It was pretty common in Arizona, and residents of the the Sun Cities always seem to be hit hardest ....Guess it must have a bias against old folks too :roll: Couldn't possibly be any other reason...

 

[greybeard]

At first, I thought this was going to be about Rio Grand Valley fever.....

 

[cow pollinater]

I am going to ask a question and hope it is not to political. Could the agricultural operations in the valley operate without migrant labor. Are we to dependent on migrant labor in all of our food production. Any thing that requires manual labor instead of running a mechanical harvester.

Also some of the fields would not procuce any more because of salt left from irrgation water looked white with the salt deposits on it.

In my opinion, no. At least not at this point. That is changing as mechanical harvesting methods improve but it will be decades before we'll see most crops machine harvested. Take olives, for example. We have the technology readily available to machine harvest them. New plantings are mostly tight spaced rows similar to a vinyard and the trees are pruned down to make a hedgerow yet the vast majority of olives are hand picked because there's so many trees already in the ground that will remain productive for decades and they're planted at orchard intervals that are only conducive to hand picking. Citrus is similar.
As to the water quality, lots of pistachios and other salt tolorent crops have gone in in the last decade on the west side of the valley where the water quality is poor.