A week before Thanksgiving, vegetable grower-shipper giant Tanimura & Antle announced, “The West Coast is officially sold out for the weekend.”

In the firm’s regular supply outlook newsletter, T&A wrote:  “We knew it was going to be tough to meet Thanksgiving demand this season, but never in the history of our company have supplies been so limited. Typically, the week of Thanksgiving is slow on the demand side, but since not all orders were filled there may still be some business. It will take until the middle of December to possibly fill the pipeline. Happy Thanksgiving!”

These comments were echoed by others in the Western vegetable industry.

“I’ve been doing this for 30-plus years,” said Douglas Schaefer, president of EJ’s Produce Sales Inc. in Phoenix. “I do not recall there ever being a time when everything was in short supply.  Cauliflower is $40, broccoli is $25-30, strawberries are $36 a box. I don’t know if anyone is carrying enough insurance to cover a load of strawberries if the truck tips over.”

At that market price, a pallet of strawberries is worth over $3,600 f.o.b. and a full truckload would be in excess of $100,000.

Mark McBride, sales veteran for Coastline Family Farms in Salinas, CA, agreed that he has never seen lack of supplies cut across every crop like it has this year.

“I don’t think that there is one commodity that has dodged the bullet,” said McBride.

He said the warm summer weather in Salinas ended that deal on a low supply note, and the switch to the desert districts has not eased the supply situation. Typically, he said a switch in areas is accompanied by a slow start as the earliest fields work through expected lower yields.

“But that gradually improves as you move into other fields,” said McBride. “That hasn’t happened this year and I don’t see anything changing before we get into the new year.”

Coastline transitioned to its Yuma, AZ, production in mid-November and is expecting to start cutting its Brawley, CA, lettuce and other vegetable fields around Dec. 7. “But I don’t think it’s going to change,” McBride added. “We are just moving from one desert area to another. They’ve all got the same issues.”

Schaefer said so much of the lettuce, and other items, is now grown on contract and the lower yields means it takes many more fields to fill those contracts.

“There is just very little left for the spot market,” he said.  

The Tanimura & Antle newsletter painted a slightly more optimistic picture, as it reported that several items would be at budgeted supply levels by mid-December.

However, that newsletter was written around the third week in November and couldn’t take into account late-November and early-December weather patterns.

During Thanksgiving week, a rainstorm from the north was heading through California and expecting to drop some rain as well as some cold temperatures through California and Arizona. While it was pushing 80 degrees in Brawley on Nov. 23, by the end of the week it was expected to drop below 70. That might be warm by Northeast standards for this time of year, but too many days of those temperatures will slow down the growth of vegetables in the desert.

And lurking on the horizon is the El Niño situation, which is expected to start bringing above-average rains to the Southwest by the end of December or early January. Forecasters are predicting a 95 percent chance that Southern California will have a wetter-than-usual January through March. Each of those rainy days will make it more difficult to harvest and potentially create supply issues.

For more than 18 months, vegetables supplies, on average, have been tight and the market price has been up. More of the same is expected for the foreseeable future.