With some warmer weather in the forecast as California steamed toward early June, vegetable supplies might start to pick up, which could mean more predictability in the marketplace.

Though that could be the case, some are not so quick to concede that, as predictability has been the enemy for the past few months.

Mark McBride, who sits on the sales desk for Coastline in Salinas, CA, and is a longtime veteran in the Western vegetable industry, told The Produce News May 27 that he is not ready to assume that normal weather and production patterns will prevail.

A warm, dry winter has been followed by a strange spring, which has seen a month of days well below normal in temperature.

In fact, the Salinas, CA, area suffered through a cold Memorial Day weekend in late May that typically signals the beginning of summer. If that weekend is a harbinger of things to come, a cold summer could be in the future.

McBride said the warm early spring brought many crops on quicker than usual and caused most grower-shippers to be harvesting one to two weeks ahead of schedule. A correction was sure to come, and it arrived in early May as supplies dwindled when the harvest transitioned to the coastal valleys of California. Hot markets have been the order of the day through most of May.

Even as the month is winding down, cauliflower is selling for about $25-32 per carton, while broccoli is in the low $20s, accompanied by several leaf items. In the waning days of May, both Iceberg and Romaine lettuce saw a strengthening in the market to the low teens.

McBride said all of the upcoming acreage in Salinas has been planted with seeds bred for a warming spring trend. That hasn’t occurred.

“I can’t predict how those plants are going to respond to this weather,” he said.

And he certainly isn’t willing to predict that California will return to a normal weather pattern after evading that scenario for the past six months.

“We had a winter that was like spring and a spring that was like winter,” he quipped. “Who knows what the summer will bring?”

Tim Tomasello of West Produce Inc. in Salinas, CA, was expecting a bit more predictability in the upcoming weeks. He said May 27 that warmer weather was predicted for the upcoming weekend for California’s Salinas Valley, and he expected supplies to increase and prices to come down. He said demand has not been overwhelming and so if the better weather does lead to an expected increase in production, the supply-and-demand curve should return to a more normal level. He said the production should take some time to increase, but the upcoming fields do look good and healthy and full of product.

“The fields are definitely looking better,” he noted.

Tomasello added that homegrown deals in New Jersey and elsewhere were beginning to yield supplies, which would also have a downward impact on market prices for Western vegetables in the next several weeks.