Growers Cling to Hope Not All Is Lost
After three straight days of freezing weather, hundreds of citrus workers faced a bleak Christmas without jobs, wholesalers tripled prices for oranges, and farmers clung to the hope some crops were saved.
On Thursday, growers fighting the cold snap in the Central Valley endured up to 14 hours of frigid temperatures, the longest spell since the arctic freeze descended on the area Monday,
State agriculture officials who pegged the crop loss at $591 million as of Wednesday said farmers suffered even more damage, but new damage estimates won’t be known until next week.
Newly appointed Agriculture Secretary Bill Lyons Jr. will visit the area next week to discuss disaster relief to Kern, Fresno and Tulare counties, where nearly half of the state’s orange crop and 15% of its lemons were wiped out.
Warmer weather forecast for the next two days will give farmers welcome relief from the strain of working around the clock for three days trying to salvage their crops. But there was no good news for consumers, who face much higher prices for oranges.
The wholesale price of California oranges, which was $9 a box Wednesday, soared to $27 a box Thursday and was rising, said Mitt Parker, president and chief executive of FreshPoint, the nation’s largest distributor of fresh produce.
Retailers, he said, were likely to absorb much of the losses themselves, because intense competition among supermarkets has left most chains unwilling to alienate customers with sky-high prices.
By Thursday evening, local supermarkets had not raised their prices--yet. Oranges, for example, generally last for two to three weeks, and it could be at least a week before the citrus freeze is reflected in grocery prices.
Sunkist Growers, a Sherman Oaks cooperative that grows and harvests up to 65% of California’s citrus crops, said it had doubled and in some cased tripled prices of every size and grade of orange it sells.
“Everyone who has fruit in California and Arizona raised prices,” said Clair Peters, a Sunkist spokeswoman. “It reflects availability of supply and demand and we’re going to see a severe cut in supply.”
Damage to citrus production in California comes just two months after the Department of Agriculture lowered its crop forecasts for Florida, the No. 1 orange grower in the U.S., a result of severe weather earlier this year. Growers in Florida are expected to harvest 190 million boxes of oranges this year, down from a record 244 million last season.
California produces 80% of the oranges eaten as fruit, while Florida grows mostly oranges for juice.
The expected drop in supply of juice oranges led Tropicana Products Inc., the world’s largest fruit juice maker, and rival Minute Maid to announce a price increase.
Price increases were small matters compared to the bleak prospects Central Valley residents face.
Many lower-paid workers who rely on seasonal jobs to support their families could be out of work for months--depending on how much fruit was lost. In Lindsay, a community of 9,000 fruit pickers, packers, growers and the small businesses that serve those workers, residents know that the best three days in Vamco Wind Machine Sales & Service history have been some of the worst days owner Mark Veteto has ever had.
He and his workers haven’t slept in 48 hours as they raced around Tulare County to repair the wind machines. Veteto couldn’t meet the demand for service, which meant almost certain crop failure for his friends and neighbors in the areas he couldn’t reach. The business owner faces the prospect of going unpaid for his efforts.
Veteto fears growers will have no money to pay bills.
“I can’t stop because I might not get paid--that’s not morally right,” Peteto said. “We all work together. That’s life in a farming community.”
Lindsay had been battling a fragile economy even before below-freezing temperatures hit the Central Valley, ushering in three long days and nights of desperate attempts to save the region’s principle industry.
Before this week’s troubles, an unemployment rate of 8% was a hard-won victory, said City Manager Bill Drennen. Following a 1990 freeze that destroyed the region’s entire citrus crop, Lindsay suffered the loss of its two biggest employers, leaving more than half of the town out of work.
By Wednesday, Lindsay’s LoBue Bros. packing and shipping plant had processed all the fruit it had, and sent 450 of its 500 workers home. Managers at the plant, Tulare County’s largest employer, told employees they were unsure when they would have enough fruit to recall workers.
At Race & Landers Hardware, Dennis Medders, 42, an assistant manager at the irrigation district and Steve Boles, 46, an insurance broker, met the store’s manager for a morning cup of coffee just as they do almost every day. The discussion, however, was less jovial than usual.
Herman Landers, 46, the manager and son of one of the owners, barely glanced at the Christmas toffee that Boles’ sister had made for the group, as he pondered the effects the damaged crop would have on his business. He says his is “an old-fashioned hardware store” that sells everything from greeting cards to paintbrushes along its crowded aisles.
“There’s a real trickle-down effect,” Landers said, as his coffee comrades nodded their agreement. “It hurts us like it hurts the growers. When the crops go, the entire economy goes. It puts a real damper on Christmas. Not a whole lot to be too merry about now.”
Veteto, at the wind machine yard, was too tired to be merry as he answered calls from growers telling him about broken machines.
“Harvey Bailey has 90% gone,” he called over to one of his workers, even as he dispatched the employee to the 4,000-acre grove to repair a machine.
The wind machines are the heavy artillery in the war against fruit frost. With a 16-foot-long rotating propeller mounted atop a lighted 30-foot-high pole, each one sucks down enough warm air to protect a 10-acre area with the power of a V-8 engine and the roar of a low-flying helicopter.
Veteto has responded to 329 calls for service, compared to 20 during a normal 48-hour period.
And to make those repairs, Vamco has only three crane trucks, five service trucks, “and anyone else that’ll come help,” Veteto said.
But even as the losses mounted, growers who had fewer than 10 hours sleep the entire week, headed back out to the fields for another long, cold morning on Thursday.
The first night of freezing temperatures brought a nerve-wracking pit-in-the-stomach waiting game, as the growers surveyed the frosty orchards hoping some warm air would move in.
Each hour, the chilly winds chipped away at their hopes for a healthy crop. But they headed back into the fields anyway, revving up the wind machines and checking irrigation pipes, which created steam from warmer reservoir water.
“‘In 1990, you knew you were finished in 24 hours,” said Joel Nelsen, president of the California Citrus Mutual, the growers’ trade association.”This year it’s a slow, agonizing death.”
Nick Hill, who manages 1,500 acres on three ranches for Greenleaf Farms in Orange Cove, said he had no choice but to do the best he could to salvage the crop, even if his efforts proved no match for the weather.
A starry sky, mirrored on the dark ground by sparling flakes of frost, was a bleak omen. Cloud cover, he explained, can act like a blanket, covering the fields with a crucial 2 to 3 degrees of warmer air.
“We are looking at a year’s worth of work and a year’s worth of labor here,” he said quietly. “‘We could see it all go.”
Nonetheless, he drove around the evergreen orange groves in his pickup early Christmas Eve morning, checking to make sure the frequent power outages had not kicked off any of his wind machines.
“If you don’t think hopefully, you might as well get out of the business, or you’ll put yourself in an early grave,” he said, looking over the trees, which were dusted with enough frost to make an unwelcome white Christmas.
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Times staff writer Abigail Goldman reported from Lindsay, and staff writer Davan Maharaj reported from Los Angeles. Staff writers Sharon Bernstein and Karen Kaplan also contributed to this report.
