Expect citrus and avocado prices to skyrocket

[andiesenji]

Growers are estimating that 75% of the California citrus crop and a significant percentage of the avocado crop will not come to market this year.

Prices are already being jacked up in response to the 4 nights of freezing temps in the central and coastal valleys.

Governor Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency in 10 counties after touring growers in the Fresno area.

They do not yet know if the effects will be as bad as the 1998 event, but some retailers increased avocado prices 100% and citrus prices 75%.

Some growers did not make it through because of the destruction of the trees themselves and the expense of replacing the major portion of groves.

There is no way to tell if the trees are damaged to the point that they have to be replaced, that will take some time. However, in spite of efforts to warm the groves, the oranges, in the late stages of ripening, are frozen on the trees. Some can be juiced, but many are still too immature.

Sometimes Mother Nature is just plain mean.

Where I live in Lancaster, we have had 4 record-breaking lows.

Saturday, January 13, - 10 degrees

Sunday, January 14, - 3 degrees!!!

Monday, January 15, - 7 degrees

Tuesday, January 16, - 11 degrees

Tomorrow morning will be a "warm-up" estimated low 15 degrees!!

Edited January 17, 2007 by andiesenji (log)

[ronnie_suburban]

Apparently, the sitaution is about as bad as it's ever been:

"Limited amounts were harvested before the freeze, so it's not like the markets are going to dry up suddenly," said Claire Smith, a spokeswoman for Sunkist Growers Inc., a Los Angeles-based cooperative owned by some 6,000 growers in California and Arizona.

Still, the diminished supply is bound to drive up prices, Smith said. Sunkist may import oranges and other fruit from South Africa and other countries.

"We may adjust the prices as we discover the full extent of the damage next week, but for now, if you bought an orange at the supermarket for 50 cents, expect to pay a dollar to $1.49 for it," said Todd Steel, owner of Royal Vista Marketing, which sells California citrus to markets throughout the country.

Damages from the freeze will likely surpass those from a three-day cold snap in December 1998 that destroyed 85 percent of California's citrus crop, a loss valued at $700 million, state Agriculture Secretary A.G. Kawamura said.

Cold ruins nearly $1B of Calif. citrus

=R=

[Toliver]

I heard a radio report this morning that strawberries have also been impacted, as well as fresh flowers, though not to the extent of the avocado & citrus crops. Strawberries are a big Santa Maria crop and flowers are grown in the north county of San Diego, from Carlsbad southward.

edited to add that the freezing nights here in the San Joaquin Valley seem to be on the way out. Weather forecasters predict night temps above freezing for the rest of the week. But the damage has been done...

Edited January 17, 2007 by Toliver (log)

[russ parsons]

i've been knee-deep in this thing since Thursday. Oranges look to be the worst, followed by avocados. but that's far from the whole story. lemons will be bad and so will tangerines (over the last 3-4 years there have been extensive orchards planted in the southern san joaquin valley, which got hit really hard). strawberries will be bad for a couple of weeks--the growers lost all of their fruit and most of their flowers, but it looks like most of the plants survived (for the record, at this time of year most of the strawberries come from north san diego county up through ventura county. vegetables will also suffer in a short window--especially leaf lettuces, which are extremely tender to frost. but also broccoli and cauliflower.

one thing that's kind of interesting is that this is far from a california-only story. rather, it points up how much the rest of the country depends on this state for its fresh fruits and vegetables. even oranges--there are huge groves in Florida, but they go almost entirely to juice. california grows about 85% of the lemons, avocados and fresh market oranges in the US.

[Smithy]

My dad always used to say that there was no point in going to Las Vegas if you were a farmer. I have some photos from 9 or 10 years ago of icicles in our groves. It's a silent disaster, not as uproarious as a hurricane, but a disaster nonetheless.

[zoe b]

smithy said--

"My dad always used to say that there was no point in going to Las Vegas if you were a farmer. "

So true! Oh, I feel for those farmers--I know how close to the bone their operations are even on a good year--that they have the strength to keep it up is amazing--that temptation to sell their land to developers and make tracks to Arizona must get overwhelming at times.

Zoe

[Shalmanese]

Nooo! I was just getting full swing into my yearly orange addiction. I live for the Winter California Navel Season, even when I was in Australia. What a bummer. I hope they have a better year next year.

[andiesenji]

My next-door neighbor has a brother who has citrus groves in Ojai. The problem is that almost all fruiting citrus, at least the trees he has, are grafted onto hardy rootstock. Losing the crop he can survive, he does have insurance but the big thing is if the grafted part is damaged, the trees have to be replaced and it takes several years to bring them to full production. He raises mostly specialty citrus which is even more sensitive to freezing than the navel oranges, which can be juiced if they freeze. The blood orange trees are one of the less hardy types and he had a significant die-off in 1998 and the replacement trees from that disaster had not yet reached maturity.

The Meyer lemons are also more susceptible to freezing as are the sweet limes. His grapefruit crop was picked in December as it is an early maturing variety.

[ludja]

I was wondering how much the freeze had damaged trees beyond *just* losing the current crop of fruit. I guess it may take further time before that assessment can be fully determined.

It must be a tough time right now in your area. Have the night time temps there increased above freezing yet?

[andiesenji]

No, but at least it has been in double digits. It is now 8:45 a.m. and my online local weather report has current temp at 15 degrees F. The low at 4:30 was 11.

Better than the past 5 days when the lows were between 3 and 9. Yesterday the high was 41 and the ice on the streets in shady areas has not melted for a week and it did not get above freezing from Sunday through Tuesday. Palmdale was not quite as cold as it is at a slightly lower elevation - this valley looks flat but the immediate area where I live the altitude is 2587, while in the center of Lancaster, 3 miles southwest of me, the "official" altitude is listed as 2355, 2415 or "2500" depending on which website you check.

The main problem we have had around here is people who don't insulate outside pipes or disconnect their sprinkler systems and drain them. Eventually the pipes, which are usually PVC will break.

The ag problem that might be most important later in the year is the fact that at this time the onion farmers, and there are thousands of acres dedicated to this crop, are usually planting the onion sets for the crop that matures and is harvested in the early summer. They can plant the sets when it is raining but not with these killing freezes.

In 1990 and in 1998 the freeze struck in early February after most of the sets had been planted, others were stored in unheated sheds and it killed everything.

Virtually no Antelope Valley onions came to market that year until the late crop harvested in September/October.

While they haven't lost the sets, the problem is the harvesting crews that move around on a fairly set schedule and if the planting is delayed they will be somewhere else when a crop is ready for harvest. It's machines and operators that do the work and they are contracted on a long term basis. The ag business is far more complex than most people understand.

[ludja]

In case you're just bypassing oranges and lemons without looking at the prices, here is a blurb from the SF Chromicle from last week: click

Good news, bad news in the produce bin: The big freeze of a few weeks ago hurt California citrus crops, but it didn't wipe them out. Ojai got hit, but closer to the water, in the hills between Santa Barbara and Oxnard, lots of fruit survived intact.

Happily, citrus prices have come down, though they will still be higher than customary this time of year. While they're going to cost a little more, there should be plenty of satsuma and other traditional citrus fruits around for Chinese New Year.

...

And California strawberries, which are often just coming into their own for the day of hearts, may let us down this year, unless we get an unexpected burst of warm and sunny weather. Chances for that are slim: It was 36° in the Santa Maria growing area Monday morning. -- Karola Saekel

I haven't been noticing avocado prices and I'm not sure what price they would usually be at this time of year.