Flooded Morro Bay 4-H Farm Needs Help

By NEIL FARRELL for Morro Bay Life

Of the many people who had major damages in the big storm of Jan. 8-9, a group of youngsters, members of the local 4-H Club, sustained among the saddest of all the heartbreaking losses from that historic storm.

Tammy Haas and Christy Dunn, two of the adults that work with the Morro Bay 4-H Club, met a Morro Bay Life reporter at the club’s farm, located on Chorro Creek Road, just outside the Morro Bay city limits, to show the tremendous damage that the rainstorm and subsequent flooding wreaked on their beloved, 2-acre farm.

Haas explained that the club leased the farmland from Pacific Gas & Electric starting back in the 1980s.

“This farm allows the opportunity for youth that live in town to raise livestock and to garden,” she said.

On average, about 15 of the club’s 35 members, both boys and girls, use the farm to raise livestock for show and sale, mainly at the Mid-State Fair. Among the animals one might find at the farm at any given time are pigs, sheep, beef, and chickens, though what animals and how many animals might be on the farm at a given time depends on the time of year.

Show animals for the fair are normally purchased in March, Haas said, to be raised to market size by the time the fair comes around in July.

And the farm was sectioned out into pen areas for the different animals — with cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens, each with their own paddock areas — and a sizable chunk of the farm was open grazing land.

Haas said when the flood, which started when San Bernardo Creek overflowed a nearby levee and roared through the lower Chorro Valley, happened, the one heifer that had been at the farm was out being bred so as to be 6-9 months along at the time of the fair.

In some sense, the flood couldn’t have come at a better time, with there being just chickens living there at the time, albeit 15 of the birds. The second day of the storm, Haas and Dunn went to the farm to salvage what they could.

When they got there, the water was just up to the top of their boots, Haas said. The two determined ladies safely removed the chickens in pet carriers, one at a time, carrying the frightened birds through rising flood waters to the safety of Dunn’s truck. She said she was able to move them all into her garage in town.

A call was put out asking for a chicken coop so the birds could have a better roost, Dunn said. And someone donated a coop, so the chickens were moved again into her backyard. The rescue was in the nick of time.

Dunn said a half hour after they got the chickens out of the farm, the water rose to nearly waistdeep levels, and the farm was on its way to being devastated.

When San Bernardo Creek overflowed, the entirety of Chorro Creek Road got flooded out, including several homes.

“Some families walked out,” Haas said, “because they couldn’t drive out.”

When the water receded — fully a week after the storm — the 4-H farm lay in ruins.

The various pens were covered in 1 1/2 feet of sticky, slippery, mud and debris and the perimeter fence was damaged. The once green, grassy meadow used for grazing animals, sat covered in mud, with patches of green grass peeking through.

Club members have been pumping out the standing water from the main farm area, fighting to dry out the property before another big rainstorm hits.

“The sunshine has helped the water go away,” Haas said. “We were making progress, and then we got another inch of rain, and it’s supposed to rain again tomorrow.”

The 4-H program is one that teaches a lot of life lessons; for instance, the kids pay for their animals and then pay to use the farm, which covers things like electricity bills, feed, and more. They put a big investment of time and effort into the animals they show and don’t see any return until they are sold.

Several of the outbuildings, including a shed where the club’s show equipment was stored, were flooded and will have to be replaced. The biggest damage was to the perimeter fence, and Haas said it must be replaced, an expense that was a shock.

Dunn explained that they had started a Go Fund Me account to help with the damages, setting a fundraising goal of $20,000. Then the first bid they got to repair the fence was for $15,000.

“We underestimated the damages,” Dunn said. The community, including Farm Supply and its members, have donated stuff to help the club, for which the ladies said they are very grateful. Someone even donated use of a roll-off dumpster, which showed up one day unannounced.

Haas said the creek also overflowed its berm back in 2017, and back then, they had cattle that had to be evacuated, too. The fence was rebuilt back then also.

“With this one,” she said, “there’s a lot more mud and storm debris that came in.”

They had some odd damages, like a walking bridge that spanned between buildings that floated away in the storm, landing hundreds of yards away in a neighbor’s yard.

And oddly enough, in the aftermath of all that chaos, they found an intact watermelon lying in the meadow. They have no idea where it came from, but it did add a little comic relief to a heartbreaking situation.

Though the Go Fund Me page has since been taken down, Dunn said they still need to raise money to put their farm back in order, before the kids start buying their show animals in mid-March.

Some volunteers are bringing in tractors to move out over a foot of muck that settled in the pig, chicken, and sheep pens.

It should be noted that 4-H has many different programs and activities. The 4-H Clubs are overseen by the University of California Cooperative Extension, Dunn said, and have different contribution rules depending on the amount.

Donations of $999 and under can be made by

Bay 4-H” and mailed to Morro Bay 4-H Club, P.O. Box 202, Morro Bay, CA 93443

Donations of $1,000 and over can be made by check payable to “SLO Co 4-H YDP” with “Morro Bay 4-H Club flood assistance” in the memo line and mailed to SLO Co 4-H YDP, 2156 Sierra Way, Suite C, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401. Dunn said, “Special thanks to the many Farm

Bureau members who have already donated, and thank you to Farm Supply Company and JB Dewar for working on logistics of supporting the Morro Bay 4-H program.”

The bottom line is that 90 percent of the Morro Bay 4-H kids that raise animals for the fair use this farm, and if they can’t get it up and running again soon, they likely won’t be able to this year.