Local and State agricultural experts will continue to assess crop loss in South Miami-Dade, but according to Miami-Dade County agricultural chief Charles LaPradd, the cold snap loss to growers will come in around $80 million dollars.
That squares up with the roadside estimates growers came up with on Friday when the consensus was that crop loss was about 40%. Hardest hit were squash and bean crops; bananas suffered, as did corn, but, “tomatoes came out okay if the grower got water on them, said LaPradd.
Getting water on the crops either by irrigation or overhead spray rigs saved the day for growers. Many started earlier when temperatures were dropping and kept it up all night.
“I was running from pump to pump,” said Brandon Moerling, a local grower. “If you lose a pump for as little as 20 minutes you can lose your crop.”
Drive-by observations indicated the cold snap damage was spotty as temperatures hovered around freezing in the most of the farm area. To sustain severe crop damage, the mercury has to drop between 26-28 degrees for a number of hours.
Moerling says he saw a thermometer at 29 degrees and heard of 28 degrees from another grower.
It has not been a great weather year for the South Miami-Dade farming community: early this year, January and February a freeze cost growers $280 million dollars.
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Produce brokers who buy for super market chains say it is too early to know exactly what the long-term effect of the freeze will do to prices in the produce section, though early-on prices for beans and squash have jumped at packinghouses.
The ugly cold snap hits farmers as fuel prices have increased, consumers are not spending freely in the supermarkets, and credit is getting difficult to obtain.
