MENDOCINO CO., 8/14/26 — Before Angela Godwin moved north in 2024 to become Mendocino County’s agricultural commissioner, she did what any numbers person would do: she looked up her new county’s crop reports. What she found was … unexpected.
“I’m like, I don’t see them,” she said. “And the ones I see look like they came from the ‘90s.”
The reports weren’t just old-looking. Recent years were flat-out missing.
The county’s 2022 crop report didn’t reach the Board of Supervisors until Nov. 18, 2025 — nearly three years after that harvest came in — and the 2023 report followed a month later, according to county board records. Both landed on the consent calendar, tucked in with the routine business. Sonoma, Napa, Lake and Marin counties have all released 2024 reports — Napa released its 2025 report in late July. Mendocino is catching up by combining the 2023 and 2024 surveys, and Godwin said she expects to return to counting one year at a time late this year.
Godwin — who took the job in June 2024 after a career in Southern California ag departments — told the Mendocino Voice the backlog was one of the first surprises in a job that turned out to hold several.
“I expected some challenges, just the shift from a much bigger department to smaller,” she said. “But that really surprised me — that there really wasn’t a good crop list, that they were that far behind.”
Why it matters
If you’re a farmer, or a grower, or in any ag-adjacent line of work, these state-required reports are an invaluable tool. The crop report is the annual accounting every California county produces of what its farms grew and what it was worth — grapes, pears, timber, livestock and the rest. It’s how a county documents a disaster year, and how lenders and insurers size up the local industry.
“If you take a look at, say, Ventura County crop reports, they became works of art — almost too much,” said Godwin, who came north from Ventura County’s ag department. “But it is a great way to also sell your county.”
Mendocino’s reports, when she found them, had been assembled in what she described as “sort of adapted PowerPoint in Word.” `The new reports in the pipeline are now in a proper spreadsheet format.
The backlog predates Godwin’s gig. Mendocino County went roughly two years without an ag commissioner of its own. When the job opened up in 2022, the county did a deal with Sonoma County for commissioner services. Key work didn’t get done.
Supervisors took up an appointment in closed session four times between September 2023 and April 2024 without making a hire, and in February 2024 approved a one-time hiring bonus for the position. The board appointed Godwin that May, and she started in June.
Even fully staffed, Godwin said, the report is harder to build than readers might guess, because the numbers behind it are volunteered, not required.
“The biggest challenge with a crop report is that the data is voluntary. I have no authority to make anyone give me the data,” she said. “But it’s mandated that we publish one. It’s certainly for their own best interest — especially for crop insurance, things like that, disaster declarations.”
With a light response from farmers, there’s an approved way to extrapolate the data. But Godwin would rather not go there. “It kinda makes my head hurt, because I’m not a statistician,” she said. “I came up from weights and measures, and I like solid numbers.”
The ag department staffing suffers like most county departments
The department doing the counting is small, and it has gotten smaller. “I got a half inspector. I split the other half. So I added one, but then I had someone go out on medical leave — he’s out for another two months,” she said, running through the roster.
The county hiring freeze covered most of last year, she said, and the county did away with its vehicle fleet about a month after she arrived. Her department now uses rental vehicles, which she says is more expensive than owning. Meanwhile state and federal contracts that fund much of the department’s work are shrinking.
“Our costs keep going up, but my contracts keep going down,” she said. The county is supposed to fill the gap. And “that’s getting harder to fight for,” she added. The contracts are state and federal ag-program agreements awarded through the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
The other half of her title — sealer of weights and measures — came with its own inheritance. The office certifies every gas pump and commercial scale in the county, and much of the test equipment is decades old.
“The state of our weights and measures equipment was really pretty shocking for me,” she said. “Everything else is either the original from, like, the ‘80s or ‘90s, or they bought something secondhand from another county that was upgrading.” The truck her staff uses to test gas pumps came secondhand from Santa Barbara County. And testing water meters? Don’t ask.
She’s quick to say the county hasn’t left her hanging. Supervisors authorized up to $220,000 in July for a replacement weight truck — the heavy rig that tests vineyard and livestock scales — and in June the board created a deputy agricultural commissioner classification. She named former county CEO Darcie Antle — still on hand, she said, as a deputy CEO — and First District Supervisor Madeline Cline as steady support.
“The board’s actually been pretty good to me. They really have,” she said. “It’s just everybody’s hurting, so it’s so hard.”
As for what the missing reports will say when they land: “I got ’22 and I got ’23 done,” she said. “I think ’24 is gonna be a good-looking year. But I’m not sure about ’25. You’re definitely gonna have a decrease in the grapes, and ’26 might be even worse.” Pear growers, she added, were hurt this year by Del Monte’s exit from the market, and from fruit that had a hard time with the March heat.
The farm surveys for 2024 and 2025 are out to the growers now — two harvests at once, to farmers who don’t have to answer. Godwin hasn’t given up … her office is planning a second round of emails and considering incentives, maybe a raffle prize for everybody who sends their numbers back.
“I’m willing to try anything,” she said.
Mendocino county is not Ventura true
Never has been. Could it be that the turnover of Ag Commissioners and loss of many experienced staff have anything to do with crop reports being missing ?