From the Fields - Larry Cox

By Larry Cox, Imperial County farmer 

The main things we’re growing now are iceberg and romaine lettuce. We started planting the middle of September, and we harvest from Thanksgiving to the first week of April. The weather has been too cooperative and nice to where we have too much product. The crop looks beautiful, quality looks nice, yields are good, but the market is not. We are oversupplied going into Christmas. Last year we had cold weather after Thanksgiving and thunderstorms up until the middle of October. The inclement weather damaged our lettuce, sugar beets and onions.

Demand goes down a little bit in the wintertime, but we have less competition because there’s not too many areas in the nation that can grow winter vegetables except the Imperial Valley and Yuma, and some out of south Texas and Florida. The bulk of lettuce and iceberg comes out of the Imperial Valley from December through March.

We’re also harvesting full blast out of our Mexicali operation. We’re harvesting green onions, cauliflower and broccoli. We finished green bean harvest and jalapeno pepper harvest in Mexico a few weeks ago.

Most of our alfalfa production comes off the end of February to the end of October. We had good production and increased acreage in the desert, and our markets were markedly lower than they were the previous year. A lot of our export customers had loaded up on product and did not need additional product, so we lost a lot of our export demand, which plugged things up from last December to now. Demand locally wasn’t enough to offset the loss in export sales. We were oversupplied on most of our forage crops.

A year ago, we had very good markets on our produce items and forage crops, and this year it’s pretty much the complete opposite. But the best cure for low prices is low prices. Hopefully, production will back down, and we’ll get back to profitability and good value for our customers.