For local farmers, the bout of heavy rain Friday night made it harder for them to maintain their crops. They say it’s been a struggle dealing with the heavy rains from major storms like Lane and Olivia, which has lead to major setbacks.

“For that time we weren’t able to prepare the soil and plant so we have a gap in our production somewhere along the line,” said Farmer Ed Otsuji, Otsuji Farms owner.

“Just preparing for storm. Even though it didn’t come I mean, we spent all that time where we could be planting and doing other stuff, we are just like trying to tie things down and get things ready,” Keri Pang, Pang’s Nursery owner.

Friday night, heavy rains fell on central Oahu, cutting the amounts of crops harvested for one Mililani farmer. He says getting ready for Saturday’s KCC Farmer’s Market was difficult because they had to harvest crops in the rain before they got bad.

“It rained a lot that daikon and the radish… they all split open,” said Souk Hoang, Pit Farms owner. “We’re probably short than normal like usually we know how much we are supposed to bring but probably cut down like almost half because most of them are bad.”

But the bad weather isn’t just affecting farmers, but their customers too. Many farmer’s market customers said they’ve seen changes in the produce they’ve been buying at farmer’s markets.

“The lady here just told us that she’s out of mint because it was too wet to harvest the mint today,” said Morgan Myrmo, a farmer’s market customer.

“I noticed that every time we have a weather event the produce kind of like you know it starts… it’s not that it’s scarce… it’s just that sometimes the quality doesn’t look too good, especially like lettuces, greens herbs,” said Star Padilla, a farmer’s market customer.

Forecasters say we can expect a wetter than normal start to our wet season due to a weak El Nino. Many farmers say they will wait and monitor the weather carefully in the coming months.