Strawberry jammed
Calif. storms swamping berry crop; prices expected to rise
Already submerged strawberry fields across California are girding for yet another deluge, threatening a $3 billion industry in the U.S.’s largest food hub.
“We were supposed to be picking berries in two or three weeks,” said Soren Bjorn, president of the Americas for top berry distributor Driscoll’s. “That’s clearly not going to happen.”
The latest in a torrent of downpours is expected to strike next week as a new atmospheric river crashes ashore. After the state’s driest three-year period on record, the California storms are bringing desperately needed water but at great economic and human cost. More than 20 people have died due to the heavy rain and flooding, and extensive crop losses in the biggest U.S. food producing state will contribute to supply shortfalls and grocery-store inflation.
For California’s strawberry industry, flooding from breached levees has made it impossible to even begin to assess the damage in the evacuated farming community of Pajaro. Driscoll’s is bracing for a big chunk of crops there to be lost, said Mr. Bjorn, who estimates about $30,000 is spent to grow a single acre. Last year, about 40,000 acres of strawberries were planted in the state, according to the California Strawberry Commission.
While it’s too early to know how badly this year’s harvests will be hit overall, strawberry prices are almost certain to rise. A producer price index for the berries rose 8.7% last year on top of a 41% spike the year before, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A 12-ounce package of fresh strawberries was $3.17 last month on average, consumer prices show, though some retailers will charge double or even triple that depending on location, demand and availability. Prices tend to inch lower in winter, when crop production in other places like Florida and Mexico starts to ramp up, but that dip is expected to be short-lived.
“There’s going to be an impact on national supply,” said Nick Wishnatzki of Wish Farms, a fourth-generation year-round berry
supplier. Wish Farms, whose crop portfolio is about 60% strawberries, has lost 5% of acreage so far and is now trying to assess damage from the latest storms.
“Things have been pretty tough for us,” Mr. Wishnatzki said. The company is already about four weeks behind its production schedule. “It’s going to be really hard to make up.”
The so-called atmospheric rivers behind the recent soakings are plumes of moisture that rise out of the central Pacific and travel across the sky and land on the West Coast. They can deliver as much water as passes through the mouth of the Mississippi River. Although they can occur in other parts of the world, in California they are crucial for providing the state with its annual water needs, but also threaten terrible damage.
This winter, the weather has been so intense that Southern California had its first blizzard warning since 1989. It has rained and snowed so much that most of California’s drought could end by June, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center said Thursday.
“We get past one storm and 48 hours later here comes another one,” said Peter Navarro, a berry farmer in Santa Cruz County. “Unfortunately, any kind of rain we get now is not helpful.”