![]() Spring wheat plants stunted by drought stress near Larimore, North Dakota. Wheat scorched by heat, waterlogged by rains Going into this growing season, Sumner says tomatoes reached the highest contract prices on record – about $100 (£86) per ton compared with last year’s record $90 (£78) per ton.Īs temperatures increase in current tomato-producing regions, like California and Italy, the plants may no longer thrive, and growers could begin shifting their work to cooler climates, like northern California and China. The high demand and reduced supply are reflected in tomato prices. ![]() But researchers predict that the global supply of processing tomatoes could fall by 6% in the next 30 years due to climate change.Įven though tomatoes are “an incredibly efficient user of water”, Sumner said, the drought “was even worse than people could have imagined”. In August, the USDA forecasted that California would only grow 10.5m tons of tomatoes, down 10% from its estimates at the beginning of the year, as drought causes them to dry up on the vine.Ĭalifornia usually produces about 30% of the world’s processing tomatoes – the tomatoes used in paste, sauce and ketchup. Tomatoes, dried up by the heat, hang from a vine on a farm in Los Banos, California. This past year marked California’s fourth in a row facing drought.Īccording to a report published by Sumner and his colleagues at UC Davis, California’s Sacramento River valley – which usually exports about half its rice to China and Japan – is facing a $1.3bn (£1.1bn) economic loss, with 14,300 agricultural jobs lost. Although rice growers generally have very senior water rights, which means they’re the first ones entitled to any available water, there just wasn’t enough water for growers to make it through a season, he said, so many opted not to plant. “Reservoirs were so low and the snowpack was so bad that literally half the crop was unplanted,” said Daniel Sumner, professor of agricultural economics at UC Davis. According to the California Rice Commission, only 250,000 acres of rice will be harvested this year, about half of a typical season. In California, rice farmers sowed the lowest number of seeds since the 1950s. And this year rice had a particularly tough growing season. Just three crops – rice, wheat and corn – provide nearly half of the world’s calories. ![]() This year, a lack of water in the state meant many farmers opted not to plant. ![]() Irrigation water runs along a dried-up ditch between rice farms in Richvale, California, in 2014. “We’re an industry that’s at the mercy of the weather.” Rice left unplanted amid drought In some areas, the storm didn’t just cause fruit to fall, but entirely uprooted or flooded trees.Īlthough this storm was particularly devastating, he adds that Florida citrus growers have weathered difficult hurricane seasons before, such as Hurricane Irma in 2017. And the impact of Hurricane Ian may not yet be over, Royce said. This would be the smallest harvest since 1943. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) predicted that the state will produce 28m boxes of oranges this season, down 32% from the previous season. Florida orange growers were already facing a challenging year as greening disease, an invasive bacterium that thrives in warm climates and can kill trees and cause fruit to drop early, hit their plants. Royce reports that in some counties growers have lost as much as 80% of their fruit. The hurricane “came right up through the heart of the citrus belt”, said Ray Royce, executive director of the Highlands Citrus Growers Association. Photograph: Chris O’Meara/APĪfter Hurricane Ian ripped through Florida’s Gulf coast counties in late September, citrus growers in the state’s main agricultural counties began reporting that 50% to 90% of their fruit had been torn off the trees by high winds and rain. Oranges rot on the ground at Roy Petteway’s citrus and cattle farm after they were knocked off the trees from Hurricane Ian in Zolfo Springs, Florida.
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