El Niño Increases Risk of Winter Flooding for California Agriculture

On Monterey County farmer Jynel Gularte's farm, the memory of the 2023 atmospheric rivers is measured in acreage: more than 200 acres were submerged, leaving the ground with a long and unhelpful appointment with standing water. For a farm, a flood is less a dramatic moment than a season of blocked access, damaged plants and machinery that cannot get where it needs to go.

This winter carries a familiar warning. El Niño is expected to increase the chances of intense precipitation and flooding, with the strongest concern in Southern California. The pattern does not distribute its trouble evenly; one field can be waiting for rain while another is trying to drain it.

When the Storm Track Moves South

Strong El Niño winters tend to pull the jet stream and atmospheric rivers south toward California. Warmer ocean temperatures can add energy to those systems, producing storms that arrive with less of the polite, intermittent pacing agriculture prefers. The Sacramento Bee reports that this combination is associated with wetter California winters and more powerful atmospheric rivers.

That does not make every inch of rain useful. A wetter winter can bring runoff too quickly for fields, canals and flood-control systems to absorb it, while the same pattern may fail to build the mountain snowpack that stores water for later. Ag Alert cautions that a strong El Niño does not necessarily translate into more snowpack, the slower reservoir refill that farms depend on after the storms have passed.

Planting Around the Wet Ground

For growers, the useful response is not to treat a wet forecast as a promise of irrigation savings. It is to revisit which blocks can tolerate a hard rainfall event, how quickly crews and equipment can return, and whether a crop can withstand a delayed start without losing its market window.

Agricultural guidance points to a deliberately unglamorous adjustment: delaying planting in areas that are prone to flooding. That can protect a stand from being established just before a storm, though it also compresses the work calendar and may shift labor, input deliveries and harvest timing down the line.

The forecast is therefore a two-part proposition for California agriculture. Southern California may see the greatest exposure to intense winter precipitation, while farms elsewhere must still weigh local drainage, access roads and the consequences of a storm arriving at the wrong stage of field preparation. More water in the forecast is not the same thing as water arriving in the right place, at the right speed, or in a form a reservoir can keep.