SAN ANTONIO, TX — More than 400 people packed the Westin La Canterra Resort Aug. 7-9, here, for the 2013 Texas Produce Convention, co-hosted by the Texas International Produce Association, Texas Citrus Mutual and the Texas Vegetable Association.

Attendance was the highest by far in a decade, according to TIPA President Bret Erickson. The boost was due in part to a focus on family fun (the traditional casino night was replaced by an awards banquet and concert by country music star Rick Trevino), but likely even more by an agenda loaded with high-priority issues that affect Texans, ranging from the state's water woes amidst an ongoing (and potentially worsening) drought to new and pending reform measures in international food safety, labor, immigration and healthcare.

Keynote speaker Tom Stenzel, president of United Fresh Produce Association, told attendees that produce consumption among women ages 18-45 has, surprisingly, actually dropped by 1 percent in the last decade.

"That's stagnation," Stenzel said. "Those are the kinds of issues we need to address as an industry."

Closer to home, Texas' water worries are likely to continue and could get worse. About 80 percent of the state is under voluntary or mandatory water-use restrictions, and aquifer levels are near all-time lows. The ongoing drought that has plagued the state for the better part of three years shows little sign of abating and could potentially eclipse the all-time worst drought in Texas' recorded history, which parched the Lone Star State from 1950-57.

While "2011 was the single hottest and driest year since records started being kept in the state of Texas, the 1950s is still the record because of its duration," Homer Tuck of the Texas Water Conservation Board told attendees during a panel discussion. "If conditions keep up like this much longer, we may have a new drought record. Things are not good on the water side."

"We've been lucky to have decent rains in parts of the state during the first part of the summer — west Texas was wet for the first time in ages — but the 12-month map [ended] July 30 is still exceptionally dry on top of two years of drought before that," added state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon of Texas A&M University. "Since 1895, there have been 14 droughts of multiple-year duration, and it's going to be just a few more months before we've outlasted those except 1950-1957 — and this could rival that one potentially. We continue to set records for lack of water in reservoirs, unfilled capacity is larger than it ever has been in the middle of the summer. The good news is levels have been relatively stable, but at near-record lows: about 65 percent full."

The long-term forecast does not offer much hope that weather patterns will change "for a long time, unfortunately," Nielsen-Gammon said.

The state is developing a variety of initiatives, based primarily around conservation and augmented by potential new reservoirs, to make sure Texas has enough water to meet demands for growers and its booming population for the next 50 years.

"We've got some challenges but we've got some opportunities if we can solve this moving forward," said former Texas Vegetable Association President J. Carnes of Winter Garden Produce in Uvalde, TX.

In other convention news, Bernie Thiel of Sunburst Farms in Lubbock, TX, received this year's Texas Vegetable Association Award of Merit while the Texas Citrus Mutual Special Award went to Earl Neuhaus of Neuhaus & Co. in Weslaco, TX.