DEL REY, Calif. — When I first visited this tiny farm town to pick peaches, I did not expect to return. Certainly not every summer. Yet in July, here I was again, in triple-degree heat, for the ninth straight year of a pilgrimage with friends to an orchard just south of Fresno, near the geographic center of California.

We come to harvest peaches from a tree we “adopted” on the farm of 65-year-old David Mas Masumoto, a third-generation Japanese-American farmer who began his adoption program to connect people to their food and to find homes for old-fashioned fruit too delicate for commercial sale. He has succeeded in ways he could not have foreseen. We are drawn back each summer by the intense flavor of the heirloom fruit, but even more by the unexpected attachments that have deepened over the harvests: bonds among members of our multigenerational team, ties with the Masumoto family, and a connection to our decades-old Elberta peach tree.

This year in particular has underscored the most profound lessons of the annual trek, which has become a window into the changing nature of a perpetually fragile enterprise in a perilous era. There is no longer any “normal” for a Central Valley farmer.

Climate change has brought extremes in heat and precipitation that play havoc with the harvest season, now elongated and unpredictable. And farm labor, long one of the few factors growers could control, has become equally unpredictable, as immigration crackdowns cause shortages and fear suffuses the largely undocumented Mexican farmworker community in the state.