WATSONVILLE — The city's food-processing industry has wilted to a shadow of its former self. Only a trio of independent food-processing and cold-storage businesses remains. Ray Rodriguez, 59, owner of Farmers Processing & Cold Storage, a Castroville native and son of field workers, is one. Del Mar Food Products Corp. and BirdsEye are the others. There was a time when the city was so overrun with the likes of Rodriguez that it was nicknamed the "Frozen Food Capital of the World." That was the 1930s and '40s, well before the North American Free Trade Agreement appeared in the early 1990s,...
