Too Many Melons

Driving through the great Central Valley last week, you could see that something was not right in melon land. All along the West Side, from Huron to Mendota, there were beaten-down fields obviously worked over, yet they were liberally littered with unpicked cantaloupes and honeydews.

Good fruit going to waste in productive fields? It’s just modern agricultural economics.

The melon market, which has been a slim and troubled one the last couple of years, is even more so right now. A mild, sunny summer (mild, that is, by Central Valley standards--meaning highs in the mid-90s) has led to a tremendous harvest. Fields that normally produce 650 to 700 cartons of melons are this year yielding as many as 900.

Of course, every tremendous harvest carries the possibility of a glut. And this year--with added competition from bumper crops of tree fruit and grapes--that came through in spades. The wholesale cost of melons early this week ranged from a high of less than 15 cents a pound for cantaloupe to less than a dime a pound for honeydew.

Prices to farmers were even lower. Fran Torigian of DFI Marketing, a melon grower-shipper, says farmers were seeing only about 60% of that.

In most cases, that drove the price of a carton of melons below the cost of picking, packing and shipping it. For example: A (roughly 38-pound) carton of honeydew melons that cost between $3 and $3.85 to get onto the truck brought farmers between $2 and $2.50.

In that situation, it actually pays farmers not to pick fruit.

“It’s a very depressed situation market-wise right now,” Torigian says. “When that happens, some growers are going to voluntarily just walk away from some of their acreage. A lot of growers lately have taken that option.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t still melons in the market. Given the potential size of this year’s harvest, a lot of growers would have to walk away from a lot of melons before it would make much of a difference.

“It’s real tough,” Torigian says. “How do you stay in it? You’ve got to play the averages. You hope to get an upturn in the market. You might lose some money now, but our season runs to October, so maybe there’ll be some $7 a carton days some time later on.”

Other summer fruits are on a roll right now as well. Good buys in the produce department include peaches, plums, nectarines and table grapes. There are some berries still around, but shop carefully: With the heat, quality will vary. As far as vegetables, look for the usual summer suspects: green beans, tomatoes, summer squash, eggplant, peppers and corn. Broccoli continues to be cheap.

Carolyn Olney of Southland Farmers Market Assn. reports that Ken and Betty Kennedy of Reedley have delicious sweet sugar plums at the Tuesday Culver City and Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday Santa Monica markets.