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| Farmers at Southern Hill Farm in Clermont, Florida tried encasing crops in ice which counterintuitively protects crops from harsh freezes. Many farmers do this. But the cold was so intense in Florida the icing did not work in many cases. Photo from Southern Hill Farm via Facebook |
If you like fruits and vegetables, the price is probably going to spike soon, if it hasn't started to do so already thanks to those big Florida freezes. If you're tired of rising grocery prices, this isn't the news you want to hear.
Some towns and cities hit all-time record lows for the month of February last weekend to kill off whatever didn't die in previous freezes this winter.
The state was hit by a freeze back on December 30, with more freezes in mid-January before a series of frigid nights began around in the final week of January and intensified in February.
It takes awhile for freeze damage to crops to become fully apparent. Farmers and agricultural organizations in Florida are just starting to assess the damage. So far, it's not looking good.
CENTRAL FLORIDA
In central Florida, WFTV reports total losses at central Florida blueberry farms:
"At H&A Farms, owner Michael Hill says his blueberry crop was wiped out because of the cold snap over the weekend. 'This whole farm is a complete loss,' They have a thousand acres of blueberry plants around the state. He cut into a blueberry to us the inside. "That's all brown. It's supposed to be green.
Hill says they pack 40 percent of Florida's blueberries, which go to stores like Publix, Aldi and Costco. And because these berries died, Michael says he will no longer need the 2,000 workers to pick them in the fields or the hundreds needed to pack them."
The crop losses will have a ripple effect. Forklift operators, quality control specialists, shipping coordinators, boxers, stackers, packers, all those occupations in Florida blueberry industry vanished in a single night of cold weather.
At one citrus farm in Plant City, in central Florida east of Tampa, temperatures remained below 28 degrees for more than six hours on both last Friday and Saturday nights. Even with covering trees with ice to protect the crops, damage starts when temperatures fall to 28 degrees or lower for four consecutive hours.
At least eight to 10 percent of the current citrus crop was destroyed, making this the worst citrus freeze since at least 2010. Future citrus crops might be affected, too.
"There will be heavy leaf loss from the frost damage and some of the young trees we've planted over the past ew months probably won't make it,' Trevor Murphy, the citrus grower in Plant City told AccuWeather. "The bloom and new flush on the trees will not make it either - we should have our main bloom toward the end of February into the first part of March. It'll be a few days until we start seeing leave and fruit drop. Coldest and longest duration of cold I've had since I've been growing oranges."
Also in Plant City, a farmer named Jonathan Allen, said his 120-acre field of sweet corn was wiped out. When farmers get desperate, they get creative. He tried building a berm and flooding the field to create a warmer microclimate, but the wind was so strong the subzero cold blasted right through the fields.
"This freeze is the worst that I can remember, probably worse than 1989....Across the board it's devastation, complete devastation."
SOUTH FLORIDA
The more recent cold wave, on the weekend of January 31-February 1 blew all the way through South Florida and beyond. A town in Cuba reached 32 degrees, the first time on record that anyplace in Cuba reached the freezing point.
Unlike previous cold waves, then, South Florida agriculture was trashed.
Markon Cooperative, a North American produce supplier, wrote in market update on Wednesday that "recent freezing temperatures across Florida will have a major impact on current crop production."
So yeah, that's really bad, since so much of our stuff comes from Florida. And I"m unsure how Trump's tariffs affect the price of food coming in from different nations, like Mexico.
Axios Miami says Markon Cooperatives affiliated squash growers report more than 50 percent of that crop has been lost. Bell pepper loses are at nearly 50 percent. Tomato growers say their fields have definitely suffered damage, but how much was still being assessed at the end of this week.
One tomato grower told CBS Miami that a good 20 percent of his crop was probably lost.
LANDSCAPES AND FIRES
Across most of Florida, plants, palms and some trees are now brown, wilted and battered. Some people, assuming climate change made them safe, planted tropical trees and plants in central Florida that don't tolerate freezes.
These plants had managed to grow for years in warmer winters, only to be wrecked by this month's freeze. Proving the climate change is uneven. The general warming trend is punctuated by extremes, like the Arctic cold Florida has experienced lately.
Floridians are being advised to leave their trashed landscaping alone for now. Then, when spring buds and shoots begin to appear, property owner will know what is destroyed and has to be removed or trimmed and which plants will survive.
Lastly, Florida now faces an increased fire risk. The state is often prone to wildfires in late winter and early spring, as the usual warm season thunderstorms are usually absent. And right now, almost all of Florida is experiencing a drought.
This year, because of the freeze, the landscape isn't as green as it usually is. There's now a lot of dead vegetation that can easily make fires spread quickly. Several fires were already burning before last weekend's freeze, and this will just make things worse.
No rain is forecast in central and southern Florida for at least the next seven days. Northern Florida is expecting only light rain at best.
At least it's starting to warm up in Florida. Another frost is expected tonight in far northern parts of the Sunshine State. But after that, for the foreseeable future, anyway, further frosts are unlikely for at least a week or two, if not more.
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