Viva Fresh is a reason to look ahead

With mid-month freezing cold and extensive crop damage, Texas growers had a rough February.

That is perhaps all the more reason that the March 26-27 Viva Fresh Expo in Grapevine, Texas,  will be welcome, said Dante Galeazzi, president and CEO of the Texas International Produce Association.

“We are still looking forward to it, we still want to see everybody there,” Galeazzi said. “It’s going to be an opportunity for folks to sit down with their Texas suppliers, and have some conversations about what the rest of the season looks like, and start planning for next season.”

Onions and cabbage fared the cold better than citrus and leafy greens, he said, but damage to those crops is hard to peg down, he said.

“It will probably be three to four weeks before we know the full extent of the losses on onions and cabbage,” he said. 

Early guesses point to 20% to 30% losses on cabbage and onions, he said.

Leafy greens were hard hit by the freeze, and Galeazzi said that could result in market volatility for those commodities in the weeks ahead.

The freeze follows a challenging 2020 season, Galeazzi said, in which Texas farmers endured the pandemic, a drought and a hurricane.

The cold snap is expected to cost the Texas industry thousands of jobs up and down the supply chain.

The freeze even extended into growing regions in northeast Mexico.

Damage to the Texas citrus crop was severe, he said, with perhaps 80% to 90% of the fruit in the 2020-21 crop lost.

“The bigger issue with the citrus is our concern now is the trees that were in bloom,” he said, noting that many of those blooms for next year’s crop were knocked off by the cold.