Farmers Ready to Battle Year’s Coldest Nights

California farmers got lucky Thursday, which for many was the first night of the year’s first big freeze. But they spent Friday preparing to do battle with temperatures expected to be even colder.

“What saved us (Thursday) was cloud cover,” said Clark Biggs, spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation. Clouds hold warmer air near the ground.

Growers of avocados, vegetables, flowers and the $680-million citrus crop reported no major losses, though all were apprehensive about clear, colder weather predicted to begin Friday night.

As of Friday morning, only a small pocket of citrus growers in the northern Sacramento Valley had been hit, suffering a $2-million loss as 80% of their crop was damaged by the unusually low temperatures.

The freeze has also slowed harvests just begun in lettuce, broccoli, celery and cauliflower fields in the Imperial Valley and north of Santa Barbara. Farmers there must wait until the vegetables unfreeze each morning before they can be picked.

“Normally we start harvesting at 6:30 in the morning; now we can’t start until 9:30 or 10:00, when the plants thaw out,” said Joe P. Prandini, general manager of Betteravia Farms, Co., with 4,000 acres under cultivation near Santa Maria.

Prandini has battled freezing nights for much of the past week, in fact, and said he has lost about 20% of his cauliflower crop.

“We’re not having a problem so far with broccoli or celery,” he said. “If it does get colder (Friday) we could start seeing a peeling of the outer skin of the celery--we call it bubbling of the epidermis--which would mean we couldn’t harvest it.”

Graydon Hall, general manager of the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Assn., said staggered planting schedules--to keep steady supplies of iceberg lettuce and other vegetables in stores--prevented speeding the harvest to avoid freezing temperatures he expects to hit that region Sunday night.

“The cold weather also slows the harvest down because it simply slows down the plant’s growth,” he added.

Orchard growers worry first about the current crop, but if a freeze is prolonged, they fear for their trees.

“If you get below 27 degrees for four or five hours, it can damage the fruit,” Biggs said. “Trees will handle that. But when you get down into the teens, farmers worry about it splitting and killing the trees.”

Many farmers planned to use irrigation, wind machines and, in a pinch, even helicopters and smudge pots, or orchard heaters, to save their crops if the freeze grows worse. But all methods depend on a good deal of luck.

Watering can raise temperatures around a plant, but the water must be allowed to flow continuously until temperatures are above freezing again.

Wind machines mix warm air with the colder air that tends to settle to the ground. But it is less effective on clear, cold nights than with overcast skies.

Helicopters and smudge pots, particularly with higher petroleum prices, are expensive alternatives.

Duncan Abbott, who grows avocados and lemons on 100 acres near Carpentaria, hasn’t used his smudge pots in 15 years.

“It would cost maybe $5,000 a night to fire them up,” he said. “I could buy half a wind machine with that.”

Citrus farmers in the northern Sacramento Valley reported the most damage from Thursday night’s freeze.

“The last time we got hit this bad was in 1972,” said Darwin Smith, manager of Orland Orange Growers Inc., a cooperative of 22 growers about 20 miles west of Chico.

“We’ll lay off 65 people here at the cooperative next week sometime,” Smith said, “plus a lot of pickers.” Smith predicted that at least 125 seasonal jobs, normally lasting three to four months, would be lost.