Maldonado flies to Colima amid Hurricane Patricia
Maldonado flies to Colima amid Hurricane Patricia
As Hurricane Patricia, one of the strongest hurricanes ever witnessed, bore down on his grower’s staked Roma planting in Colima, Emilio Maldonado chose to fly there, rather than to the PMA convention in Atlanta.
The storm made landfall at 5 p.m. on Oct. 22. About the same time, Maldonado’s commercial flight to Guadalajara had landed and the grower had driven through two hours of pouring rain to the farm near Tecoman, Colima. Tecoman is just miles from the border with the state of Jalisco. At this border, Patricia’s fullest fury struck. Of course, the hurricane soon dissipated after landfall but the winds pounded the coastline long enough to have caused considerable damage there.
The owner of E.H. Maldonado & Co., based here in Rio Rico, doesn’t know the official wind speed but guesses it was beating his stake tomatoes at about 100 miles an hour. The 30 acres of tomatoes were two days from harvest. The Roma plants and their trellises were flattened. Any hope of salvaging the tomatoes was ruined by huge volumes of rain. The plants were still-rooted and the rain “popped them,” he said.
Honeydew and watermelon planting was more recently underway and the losses “were not that bad,” Maldonado added.
E.H. Maldonado was created in the late 1980s. Maldonado ships to major retail, and other, customers that range from Boston to Vancouver. He works with seven Mexican growers that are all GAP food-safety certified. Two growers are in Colima and three are in Caborca, which is in the northern reaches of Sonora and one grower is in Guaymas, Sonora. Another grower is in Escuinapa, in southern Sinaloa.
Everything shipped by Maldonado is under the “Nelly’s Best” brand.
Maldonado expected to begin shipping honeydew, Romas and Chiles from Guaymas about Nov. 30.
While its early watermelon deal was hurt, generally E.H. Maldonado ships honeydew and watermelons from October through July. The firm also ships avocados.
