A Tough Year for Shoppers

This will be remembered, at least by shoppers, as the year iceberg lettuce topped $3 a head.

One of the wettest springs in recent memory, highlighted by devastating flooding in the Salinas Valley in mid-March, pushed produce prices to heights seldom before seen.

Iceberg lettuce was just one example.

The California almond industry, which produces almost all the U.S. crop, was devastated. The 1995 harvest was less than half of 1994. Even worse was the long-term damage. More than 20,000 acres of trees were blown down during spring storms. That’s less than 5% of the total, but it will be at least five years before the replacement trees start bearing.

The economic impact is still rippling. In Glenn County, for example, one of the main almond plants stopped packing four months early. “They’re going to be out of work from January through September,” says County Agricultural Commissioner Ed Romano. “That’s a substantial employer in one of our towns. They’re going to be really hard-hit.”

Cherries, which bloom and pollinate during the period the storms hit, were down almost 70% from 1995 (and of the crop that was picked, almost 80% went to Japan, where at one point an 18-pound case of California cherries fetched more than $100 wholesale).

The town of Castroville, where most of the nation’s artichokes are grown, was evacuated, with flood waters lapping at the main street. As a result, the artichoke harvest was almost 40% short of last year. “We had people calling all spring asking when artichokes would be coming into season so the prices would come down,” says Mary Comfort of the California Artichoke Advisory Board, a commodity group. “I had to tell them they wouldn’t.”

The same damp weather that chilled the cherry crop affected other tree fruit as well. The 1995 apricot harvest was 60% less than the previous year. Plums were down almost 40%. Even late-summer fruit like nectarines and peaches were down 15% to 20%.

In many cases, these shortages had more effect on shoppers than on growers. Unless you’re a farmer who got completely flooded out, there was a silver lining to those March floods. In fact, the total value of farm crops produced in Monterey County this year actually may end up being more than last year.

“Because of the psychological effect of the floods, we had major price increases that stayed in place for some time,” says Dick Nutter, county agricultural commissioner. “Those early spring-summer prices allowed some growers to make considerable amounts of money.

“Unless you had land right next to the river and didn’t have any growing ground that was outside the flood plain, the chance that you made lots of money is pretty great,” he says. “Of course, in that flood area, some people lost their socks.