They already know it’s bad, but local grape growers won’t truly know how much damage their crop took from Tropical Storm Hilary until they get the answer to a deeper question: How much will North American consumers pay for California table grapes?
Labor costs skyrocket when harvest workers have to spend extra time trimming off rain-ruined berries and then reshaping every bunch. It remains unclear whether growers and retailers will be able to pass those costs along this year — or whether salvageable grapes will be left on the vine to wither.
President Kathleen Nave of the California Table Grape Commission said in a news release Thursday growers are willing to help get grapes on shelves and promote them to consumers. In exchange, she added, the price retailers pay to growers “will need to be enough to make it worthwhile to harvest.”
According to Thursday’s release, Hilary claimed roughly a quarter of California’s table grape crop, an estimated 80% of which comes from Kern and Tulare counties. Others say the toll could rise to as high as 50%, bolstering the case for a disaster declaration that would lead to local financial help.
Wheeler Ridge grower Mark Hall told of losing an entire block of table grapes, despite warm wind he hoped would dry out vineyards after the storm. But it’s instead been an unprecedented struggle against moisture that hit at “just the wrong time.”
“They were beautiful big, green seedless grapes, and they melted,” he said. “They looked good a day or two after the rain, and I dusted them again a second day, and the following morning, Wednesday morning (Aug. 23), they were just gone.”
Elsewhere Hall has deployed work crews to harvest a couple of blocks he said were unaffected by Hilary. But he expects to lose at least 50% of his crop this year.
The wildcard is prices: With less crop to pick and higher labor costs to cull through it, he said, “everybody’s going to get sticker shock.” Retail buyers who worry consumers won’t pay higher prices “just can’t understand” why growers are charging so much, Hall said.
“Everybody’s waiting to see what happens,” he said late last week. “It’s actually getting worse every day.”
Local grower Jack Pandol said damage he has seen varies by grower and variety, but that the level of damage he’s seeing is in line with the commission’s estimate.
That assessment predicted a loss of 25 million 19-pound boxes of table grapes, or a little more than a third of what remained to be harvested when the storm hit. The commission lowered its estimate of this year’s crop to about 72 million boxes, the industry’s smallest since 1994.
Senior Vice President Kevin Andrew at Bakersfield-based grower Illume Agriculture said by email the 25 million-box estimate is widely seen as a minimum, and with damage to later varieties still unknown, some suspect the real loss will amount to 50 million boxes.
He wrote that farmers aren’t just coping with production losses; they must also decide “whether the much higher costs to pick and pack the fruit is warranted unless pricing gets substantially higher.”
Senior Analyst and Vice President David Magaña at RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness said by email there are indications prices may stay elevated “for a while, even after the California season.” He noted some grape-growing parts of Peru are coming up light this year because of conditions linked to an El Niño weather pattern.
Nave at the grape commission said she thinks Kern got hit harder than other areas that also saw historic precipitation Aug. 19and 20. She said it appears to have rained both days in the Delano area and once, hard, in places like Arvin. Madera was mostly spared while Kings and Fresno counties experienced at least some of the unwelcome rain.
Decay and cracking haven’t ruined every last grape, she said, but damage spreads easily from grape to grape. High-sugar fruit is most at risk; Nave said there’s hope berries that weren’t yet mature when the storm hit may be fine.
“The picking is very, very slow,” she said. “Every bad berry has to come out.”
Having less product hurts growers and farmworkers alike, spreading economic damage through whole communities, Nave said, adding the industry plans to press elected officials to undertake the slow process of securing disaster relief.
Most of the crop that remains to be harvested will probably stay in the United States, Canada and Mexico, partly because of the need to maintain longstanding commercial relationships, she said, but also because shippers can’t risk putting bad grapes in a box that has to make a three-week trip to Asia.
In the meantime, Nave hopes consumers will look for and ask retailers for grapes grown in California.
“The message for consumers is, it makes a difference how you spend your money,” she said.
