On Jan. 15, the Washington Post ran a story on the front page of its Style section headlined, “Cauliflower is so hot right now you may not be able to afford it — or find it.”

That same day, cauliflower from the California and Arizona’s winter vegetable districts was being sold at below break-even prices.

“It shows you how quickly things can change,” said Denny Donovan, sales manager for Fresh Kist Produce LLC in Santa Maria, CA. “We’re reading about cauliflower selling for $9 a head [in Washington, DC] and we’re sending crews home early because we have stuff in the cooler we can’t sell.”Denny Donovan

For the most part, the unprecedented run of sky-high vegetable prices is over, with celery being one exception still in a demand-exceeds-supply situation.

Mark McBride, who sits on the sales desk at Coastline Family Farms in Salinas, CA, said a couple of weeks of good weather and no frost in the desert vegetable areas has increased the volume to the point where most items are being sold at fairly normal winter rates.

“We had light ice [on some crops] early during the week of January 11, but it has been warmer since then and the forecast is for the lows to be in the mid- to high 40s and the highs to be in the high 60s to low 70s until at least the middle of next week [the week of Jan 24],” he said Jan. 20. “That has led to better growth and the fields have gradually cleaned themselves up [from quality issues]. We see an increase in production moving forward. The markets have definitely eased up.”

Donovan said while the long run of very high prices was not sustainable and everyone knew it would eventually come back to normal, “we were hoping for a more gradual decline. We thought the $40 cauliflower market would drop to $35, then $30 and $25 and decline in an orderly fashion. That didn’t happen.”

Howard Roeder, president of Dole Fresh Vegetables Inc. in Monterey, CA, said the sudden drop to $8 from $40 almost overnight is indicative of how difficult it is to predict future supplies with any degree of certainty.

On Jan. 20, Roeder was fairly confident that steady supplies would prevail for the next several weeks for most of the vegetable items. “I’m always hesitant to predict beyond three weeks,” he said, noting that a change in weather will affect supplies very quickly.

He also explained “that there’s not a lot of speculative crops being planted anymore.” When a grower puts a crop in the ground, for the most part it has a home 60-90 days later when it is ready to be harvested. “So when Mother Nature does what she does, we can get disrupted fairly quickly.”

Roeder said the value-added category continues to experience impressive sales growth, meaning more and more acres are contracted for that segment of the market.

“The next two to three weeks, we should be OK,” he said. “After that, we will see what happens.”

Though much of Central and Northern California have been hit with above-average rain since the beginning of the year, the desert areas have been spared for the most part. So while those current crops are being harvested, growers in the coastal California valleys that will be producing the majority of the nation’s vegetable crops in the spring are having a few problems getting into the fields to plant.  

“The growers around here are getting nervous,” Donovan said from his Santa Maria office. “The transplants are in the nursery and ready to go in the ground. Growers need four or five clear days to get it done.”

He said the shift in lettuce production to Santa Maria typically occurs around April 1. Those fields harvested in April need to be planted this month. If the storms continue, that could be an issue.

Donovan said that in that event, grower-shippers might plant some extra acreage in the desert and try to stretch that deal a few weeks longer than usual.

From his Salinas perch, McBride said the weather has not yet had a major impact on planting because it is still a bit early. However, he noted that if rains continue to pelt California for the next couple of months, as the El Niño promises to do, there could be major supply issues come spring. Only time will tell.