As we try to survive what has become a politically charged COVID-19 era, there's one thing we do know: Agriculture is a necessary endeavor in this country. Even so, farmers are concerned over who enters their property. While employees need legitimate access, controls are in place, based on state and federal edicts, to limit access to everyone else.

Conversations between groups like AgSafe and growers, packers and shippers, and farm labor contractors, include all of that, and then some. As transportation fleets that haul farmworkers to their various job sites are grounded due the COVID-19 concerns, employers are dealing with how to fairly compensate employees for the time it takes them to go from one location to another, based on the job needs.

Adding to those costs, and perhaps this may be why the price of broccoli at the grocery store doubled recently, are the additional passes harvest equipment must make in the field to employ social distancing guidelines. For instance, a lettuce or broccoli crew that can make one pass, working shoulder-to-shoulder, now needs multiple passes of the equipment to harvest the crop and stay within social distancing guidelines, according to Amy Wolfe, president and chief executive officer for AgSafe.

The N95 masks that are in short supply for medical workers are also an item required by certain pesticide labels and air quality regulators in California.

Related:Dumping milk in California: Dry markets force caps

In other news, I recently saw a newspaper story that appeared to chide parts of California for not adhering to travel restrictions. Based on a map that showed regions of the state where automobile traffic was not significantly off – think empty Los Angeles and San Francisco freeways – other areas did not see such declines.

The map showed counties in the San Joaquin Valley that did not appear to have as much of a reduction in traffic as the big cities. Implied in this was the notion that Valley residents are not doing their part, yet those Valley counties produce over half of this nation's food.

Meanwhile, we're now beginning to see the predictable effects of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act on farmland values. The annual report by the California Chapter of the American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers shows that farmland values were flat in 2019, absent one outlier that was explained as speculators banking on water supply cuts that may not be as bad as in other locations.

As much of the world is concerned with flattening the COVID-19 curve, California's access to irrigation water will flatten the curve for some crops as planned irrigation water cuts will no longer sustain the fast-paced planting of almonds and pistachios in marginal locations. Instead, watch the speculative price of good farmland with multiple sources of irrigation water rise precipitously as the values across other regions in the state drop like the stock market on a bad day.

Related:UC urges cattle producers to take precautions