Orange Prices Rise $2/3 Per Box With Freeze,Paramount Cites Supply Issue

Reports are still coming in as to the extent of the damage to the citrus crop in the Central Valley from the December 4-10 freeze.
Growers note the cold hit early in the season, when about 75 percent of the state’s citrus crop was still on trees. Luckily fruit had a high sugar content for this early in the year that is a plus in preserving the fruit in cold.
Still,in some areas of Tulare County, all fruit in mandarin groves was described as “toast,” whereas in many navel orange groves, damage appeared more limited. The variability of crop loss reflected factors such as farm location, frost protection methods used, citrus variety and crop maturity.
“We put in tough nights for more than a week or so, with temperatures dropping below 25, and that’s true for growing areas all over the valley,” said citrus grower Greg Kirkpatrick of Exeter, whose family grows citron, Kaffir limes, lemons and tangelos.
“I’m sure there’s damage to our lemons because they are so frost-sensitive and there’s undoubtedly significant damage to lemons throughout the citrus belt,” Kirkpatrick said. “Fortunately, our Satsuma mandarins were harvested before the freeze. Our late varieties—Shasta and Gold Nugget—didn’t have enough sugar to withstand the freeze. We still need to assess the damage, but it may be quite a lot.”
Tulare County officials agreed that mandarins probably didn’t withstand the freeze very well.
“We don’t have official numbers yet, percent of damage or value of crop loss,” said Tom Tucker, Tulare County assistant agricultural commissioner. “We’re still out cutting in the groves. Unfortunately, damage is across the board. There are several fields, especially navels with high sugar, that will show a percentage of damage. In some cases, damage is relatively minor.”
He said other groves are showing almost 100 percent loss, especially mandarins.
Citrus has been grown in the San Joaquin Valley for more than 100 years. The on-farm value of California-grown citrus fruit in 2012-13 totaled $1.5 billion.

Paramount Points to Navel Damage

The states largest citrus grower Paramount Farms sent out a December 20th letter to growers from Zak Laffite VP Supply Chain that said prices are rising reflecting a reduced supply of fruit.While some reports are suggesting damage to navels was minor in most places the Paramount letter says “frost damage on navels has been more extensive than initially thought and finding unaffected fruit is becoming increasingly difficult.”
As for Clementines damage is more scattered than navels the letter says.
Damaged fruit is being sent to the juice market quickly “before it loses its value.”
A substantial amount of Paramount’s holdings are in Kern County that appears to have been harder hit that warmer areas to the north.One press account says” Early inspections of freeze-damaged citrus in California’s Kern County pegged mandarin orange and lemon losses at around 20%, and navel losses at less than 5%.”

Helping to reduce damage seen in past decades is improvement in technology in the filed from irrigation micro emitters to more powerful wind machines.

“In the past decade the industry has made significant advances in technology at the packinghouse,” says Joel Nelsen, Citrus Mutual Board Chairman and General Manager of Orange Cove-Sanger Citrus Association. “We can now see, literally, what damage exists internally in each piece of fruit. This technology has cost most packinghouses hundreds of thousands of dollars, which will reap dividends this year.”

Nevertheless, damage assessment can be an arduous task. Starting in the field, extreme and identifiable damaged fruit will be eliminated from the fresh market and directly shipped to the juice plant. For California citrus, juice plants are, by design, a salvage operation for lower quality fruit. “Sending fruit to the juice plant is certainly not ideal for growers from a revenue perspective,” says Nelsen. “Generally speaking, the return for juiced fruit is only sufficient to cover harvesting costs.”

CCM Director of Industry Relations Bob Blakely says he has heard estimates ranging from 30 to 50% damage to the Valley’s navel crop. Making it worse it has been warm since the freeze , speeding up up deterioration of the fruit he says. Blakely says Kern damage was likely worse than Tulare County since most of the fruit there comes off early and they have not invested in wind machine technology as much.

As to prices Blakely says he would not be surprised to see a 10% jump in prices noting that it is more expensive to harvest and sort the fruit. Nick Hill managing partner at Greenleaf Farms says he expects prices to rise $2 to 3 dollars a box, not enough to scare away demand.”We learned our lesson from past years that you can’t jack the price up too high.”

CCM says this was  the earliest severe freeze event in over 25 years for Valley citrus growers.

In Fresno County“the damage doesn’t seem widespread, but we are rejecting lots and bins that exceed the tolerance,” said Fred Rinder, Fresno County deputy agricultural commissioner. “Probably the most damage we’re seeing is in the cara cara navels and mandarins. Lemons are spotty and navels are hit and miss too.”
“We’ll be out there doing freeze (inspections) at least through late February,” Rinder said Dec. 19. “We haven’t even started our historically coldest period. We could easily have another freeze by the end of January that would throw everything caddywompus>”