-March 14,2019-
Stormy weather and heavy rain in the first three months of 2019 have slowed California’s strawberry harvest compared to the same period in 2018. Through March 11 California has produced 15.6 million flats compared to 19.4 million through the same time in 2018 according to the the National Berry Report.
But it has been far more dramatic than that in the Santa Maria strawberry district where farmers grew just 175,345 flats this season so far compared to 1.5 million over the same period the year before.
Nothing
The California Farm Bureau reports that even though he has production in Salinas, Santa Maria, Oxnard, Florida and Mexico, David Lawrence, president and owner of Red Blossom, a grower-shipper-packer based in Los Olivos, said he won’t have “any considerable volume” until March, when production in Santa Maria begins to pick up.
Having some production in Oxnard allows him to “catch a little bit more of that early marketing window,” when there’s not much competing fruit on the market and prices are historically higher, he said. But with rain curtailing harvest, he said his crews have picked about a thousand boxes, which he described as “nothing” compared to the last three years, when weather was more favorable for production.
“This year, we got a considerable amount of rain to hold back production. It’s the perfect scenario for a high market,” he said.
Kevin Gee, a grower in Santa Maria, said a bumper crop last year “killed the market,” adding that the financial hit was especially hard for smaller growers, leading some to get out of the business and others to reduce strawberry acreage.
This year fields protected by hoop houses fared better than open field production.
The strawberry commission reported a 12 percent decline in California acreage during the last three years, though it noted that “total volume for each of those years has achieved record production.”
Blueberries off too
California blueberry production has suffered as well with a harvest of only 276 thousand flats so far this year compared to over a million flats for the same time in 2018.
The blueberries in the supermarket today in the US typically come from South America adding up to nearly 50 million flats compared to to 56.7 million flats this time last year. Chile and Peru send the most here.