In an excruciating span of just a few days, the Central Valley has been hit with announcements that will eliminate roughly 2,100 jobs tied to the agriculture and food processing this year.

Del Monte’s Modesto cannery is set to close, reported The Modesto Bee, costing about 600 full-time jobs and another 1,200 seasonal positions. Mission Bell Winery in Madera is preparing to lay off more than 200 workers. JBT FoodTech, a manufacturer of equipment used by the food processing industry, is winding down its Madera operation with layoffs ahead of a planned closure in 2026.

Taken individually, each of these decisions has its own explanation. Del Monte is in bankruptcy and the canned fruit business has been shrinking for years. Mission Bell is closing after losing a major distribution contract. JBT FoodTech appears to be shifting production to Florida and Brazil. But taken together — and viewed in historical context — they point to a longer-term shift in how and where the Valley fits into the food economy.

This is not about agriculture going away. The Valley will continue to grow enormous volumes of food. What seems to be changing is how much of the processing, manufacturing and value-added work happens here.

Canned fruit has been losing shelf space to fresh and frozen for decades. Labor-intensive, hand-harvested crops like peaches have become harder to pencil out. The Del Monte closure in Modesto is not only a clear example of a long trend — it’s also an echo of the past. Del Monte closed its Kingsburg cannery in 2012, shedding over 1,000 jobs and consolidated operations into — you guessed it — Modesto. Now that plant, too, is gone.

Mission Bell’s situation reflects a different reality of modern food and beverage businesses: local facilities are often only as secure as their place in a much larger corporate supply chain. Losing a single major contract such as Gallo can determine the fate of a plant, regardless of its history or workforce.

Not to mention, the wine industry is in a correction period as alcohol consumption trends shift, though some see “green shoots” of recovery for a wine industry in decline.

JBT FoodTech is a different kind of signal. This is not a grower or a processor, but a company that builds the machinery used by food processors. If production is indeed shifting to Florida and Brazil, it suggests that future investment is being directed to places seen as more competitive or better positioned for manufacturing growth.

That inevitably raises a sensitive but unavoidable question: how much does California’s business climate factor into these decisions? Costs, regulations, energy prices, permitting timelines and overall complexity all play a role in where companies choose to invest. It would be simplistic to blame any one factor, but it’s also unrealistic to think it plays no role at all — especially when companies are openly moving production to other states or countries.

What emerges from all of this is a quieter but important shift: the Central Valley is at risk of becoming more of a production-and-shipping region and less of a processing-and-manufacturing region.

That distinction matters. Processing and manufacturing are where higher-wage, skilled jobs tend to concentrate — mechanics, technicians, engineers, supervisors and managers. When those layers thin out, the economic ecosystem becomes less diverse and less resilient.

None of this means the Valley’s agricultural economy is in crisis. But it does suggest it is changing in structure. And over time, that structure will determine whether the region captures the full economic value of what it grows — or whether more of that value is created somewhere else.