VENTURA : Farmers Taking a Loss on Celery Crops This Year

The celery crop that Ventura farmers are harvesting this spring is netting barely half the price it drew last year, as fields here and across the state produce far more celery.

“It’s just the brutality of supply and demand,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “The euphoria that we experienced last year has been replaced by tragedy this year.”

Consistently one of Ventura’s largest cash crops, celery brought in as much as $20 a carton at its peak last year. In January, prices dropped to as low as $3.50 to $4 a carton, so low that some farmers left stalks rotting in the fields rather than harvest them, local salesmen said.

With prices rising to $7 or $8 a carton last month--about the break-even point--harvesting picked up again and should continue through July 15.

Still, local farmers expect to lose money on this year’s crop.

“We’d have to average $50 a carton to break even now,” said David Cook from the sales office of Deardorff-Jackson Co. in Oxnard. “We sold so much, so cheap.”

Ventura County farmers grow celery on about 9,500 acres, most of them on the Oxnard Plain, county Agricultural Commissioner Earl McPhail said. The crop, which is shipped to markets nationwide, brought in $78.9 million in 1992.

That sum could be even higher when 1993 sales are calculated. Heavy rains in the winter, as well as plant disease, kept the yield low and the prices high in much of 1993, Cook said.

In Ventura County, the celery harvest begins in November and lasts through July. Each celery crop needs 90 to 120 days to grow. The county requires farmers to stop harvesting July 15 and leave the fields empty for at least a month before the next crop is planted.