Salad Days

Last year at this time, Californians were alternately cheering the end of the drought and fretting over just how expensive the rain-drenched produce department might get.

This year, the weather so far has been relatively dry, and lettuce is affordable again.

Iceberg lettuce, which shot from a wholesale price of 40 cents a head to almost $1 between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year (and that’s before things got really crazy with the March floods), is now a little more than 20 cents a head (remember that these are wholesale prices).

The same is true for romaine lettuce (one-third the price of last year) and broccoli (half the price of last year).

The drops are largely due to the weather. While last year’s early rains kept harvests small, this year’s warm, dry days and nights have been perfect for vegetable growing.

Too perfect, farmers say. At this time of year, most of the winter vegetable crop shifts from Santa Maria and Bakersfield to the Imperial and Coachella Valleys. Not only is the southern harvest a little bigger than expected, it’s also fully two to 2 1/2 weeks earlier than normal.

This has caused an overlap with the end of the northern harvest, creating a vegetable glut and driving prices down.

“Things are fairly depressed around here right now,” says Dick Dillon, deputy agricultural commissioner for Imperial County. That’s in marked opposition to last year, when growers took advantage of a high market to make good money.

Ironically, last year’s optimism is another reason for this year’s gloom. When farmers do well, they plant more. And lettuce acreage in the Imperial Valley is up 5% to 10% from last year.

The question is how long the weather and these prices will last. No one’s predicting significant rain soon, but Dillon, for one, sees a possible week to 10-day break in the price drought in a couple of weeks.

“Because of this early harvest, we may have a good-sized gap right after Christmas,” he says. “At this rate, all the lettuce that is supposed to be packed then, we’ll be picking next week.”