There is about a four-week window just before the time of harvest when dates are most vulnerable to the ravages of weather. That also happens to coincide with a time of year when probability of rainfall in the Coachella Valley of California is increasing. So no matter how great the weather might have been earlier in the season, and no matter how promising a crop might look, weather always has the last say in what will be harvested. And that is true not just with dates but with most agricultural commodities regardless of where they are grown.

That was the case in 2012, when what looked like fairly good date crop was shortened by wet weather as a tropical storm unburdened itself of about five inches of rainfall over the Coachella Valley. That resulted in “a tremendous loss” to the industry, said Albert Keck, president of Hadley Date Gardens Inc. in Thermal, CA. Hadley had been anticipating yields just slightly below normal, and “things were looking pretty good, and then we got slammed,” he said. “We ended up losing about 40 percent” of what remained to be harvested.

The trees responded this year with a huge bloom and a heavy yield, Keck said. “We had a lot of bunches, big bunches, hanging from those trees,” and weather into the third week of August was “quite ideal. We had a beautiful crop coming in.”

Then Mother Nature intervened again, as a tropical storm in late August brought high humidity and two inches of fairly widespread rainfall to the valley.

Keck, like other date growers in Southern California, spent the next several days trying to assess the effects of crop damage inflicted by the storm system, and it proved to be variable. Some blocks “had as high as 30 percent loss,” he told The Produce News. Other blocks exhibited very little damage.

Most of the damage was to Deglet Noors, he said. Medjools were only minimally affected.

Fortunately, the extent of the damage this season is not only less serious than last year but it is also less than the anticipated volume increase, so that even with the losses in some groves, Hadley expects to see an increase in production. Because of young plantings coming into production, combined with improved yields overall, the increase in crop volume looked to be “at least double” the amount of fruit lost to rain, he said. “I’m cautiously optimistic.”

That said, “we’re still in that danger zone,” and there were still a couple of weeks to go before the risk of additional rain damage would become just a minor concern.

It is fortunate for the industry that even though the date growing areas in the Coachella Valley extend over a relatively small geographic area — about 15 miles by 25 miles — it is a geographically diverse area with date orchards located at various elevations, on various soils and in various microclimates, giving the valley a three-month harvesting window.

Additionally, he said, there is considerable diference in the height of the trees, depending on age. The trees in one block may be 50 feet higher than those in a younger adjacent orchard, and the effects of a weather system may be “completely different.” Therefore, any weather event will ordinarily affect a portion of the crop.

Another good thing about that wide variation in harvest times among various orchards in the valley is that the field work can be spread out over a longer period of time, so fewer field workers are needed for the cultural practices and the harvest than is the case with some other crops, and they can be kept busy for a longer period of time.

Hadley’s Medjool harvest had been going since around the end of August. “I think we will go into peak harvest here this week and next week, possibly,” Keck said. He expected the first Deglets to be harvested during the first two weeks of October, with the peak of that harvest continuing from around the third week of October into the middle of November.

“We’ve got a lot of young plantings in the ground here at Hadley,” both Medjools and Deglets, “and we are looking forward to the next few years” as they come into production, Keck said. “Deglets are still the majority of the crop, but the big increase in percentage has been with the Medjools. We enjoy both. They are both wonderful fruits.”

The young plantings “are starting to come into production more and more every year now,” but it is still “a scramble to keep up with demand,” he said.

“We definitely want that increase in production, and we should continue to see that over the next few years,” he added.