South Florida spring produce
Click here to read the Florida spring produce overview.
Based near the east coast with other locations throughout south and central Florida, Alderman Farms, Boynton Beach, Fla., grows tomatoes, kale, collards, chard, sweet corn, bell peppers, eggplant, yellow straight neck squash, zucchini and cucumbers — much of it certified organic for the past decade. That’s a feat in this tropical climate: “It’s not easy,” Alderman said. “To do organic tomatoes, they have to be vine-ripe and can’t be gas green tomatoes, so you have to be real quick in distribution.” Alderman ships to a lot to the Northeast, Chicago and a little bit of the Midwest. Customers include major retailers such as Publix. “And they’ve done a really good job promoting local,” he said.
Tomatoes — round slicers, grape and roma — are the biggest crop for Alderman Farms, which started planting in September, finishing the last week of January at the South Florida locations. Tomato harvesting began mid-October and is expected to last into May. The greens follow a similar timeline. “It was a tough fall with a lot of rainfall in September, October, but the winter season has been good to us. Everything is pretty dry lately, so it’s average now,” Alderman said. Alderman lost three or four plantings of sweet corn in Belle Glade in Palm Beach County because of a freeze in February.
“We had quite a bit of damage, but we’re hoping to be back in good supply in about a week,” he said, noting the consecutive tight plantings every week. All in all, volume is heavy, yields are good. The problem is that prices are dragged down by Mexican imports of tomatoes, bell peppers and squash. “They figured out how to grow organic bell peppers, and they’ve just crushed that market,” he said. “It’s probably 40% cheaper this year than last several years.”
As a university extension agent for Southwest Florida’s Hendry, Charlotte, Lee and Collier counties, Craig Frey collects data and helps growers at tomato, watermelon, green bean, squash, cucumber and sweet corn farms. The winter freeze in the Northeast U.S. reduced demand for South Florida’s crops, causing prices to drop and some product was left in fields unharvested, Frey said — “but not to the extent that it was when the coronavirus shut everything down.” A lot of tomatoes grown in southwest Florida are for the foodservice industry. His region’s tomato growers will likely keep harvesting until the end of April, start of May, and a lot of them have more farms in Central Florida to continue harvesting after that.
Some local weather affected the crops too. Hurricane Eta struck Florida twice in November, causing flooding in Southwest Florida and a declared state of emergency. “I saw some snap bean fields that were so completely underwater, you couldn’t see them,” Frey said. “Because of that, it sounds like the market’s been pretty good for a while. Even though everyone took a big hit, as things progressed, what they did have sold at a good price.”
Snap beans harvest from the end of October until the beginning of May in southwest Florida. Hendry, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties are three major producers of snap, or green, beans in Florida.
March is also watermelon season for that region. Of the state’s 27,823 acres of snap beans harvested in 2017, more than 23% came from Collier and Hendry counties and 51% came from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Immokalee’s earliest plants will start harvesting in mid- to late March for the spring crop, and it lasts about a month or so. There’s a fall crop too.
