THONOTOSASSA \u2013 Jerry Wright lost half of his crop on his 40-acre strawberry farm, Passion Organics, when the temperatures dipped below freezing several nights in a row at the end of January and into the first week of February.<\/p>\n
He estimated his financial loss is in excess of $700,000.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s one of the most catastrophic losses he\u2019s seen in 40 years of strawberry farming in and around Plant City. It\u2019s rivaled only by the winter of 1988-1989 when it was so cold over Christmas the electric grid became overwhelmed and many thousands of Tampa Electric and Florida Power customers lost power.<\/p>\n
That winter he ran the sprinklers day and night for four days straight to protect his crop.<\/p>\n
Berry and citrus farmers routinely spray their crops with water during freezing temperatures. A coating of ice insulates the plant and keeps the temperature underneath from dropping below 32 degrees, protecting the entire plant.<\/p>\n
So what happened? Wind.<\/p>\n
According to data from the National Weather Service, wind speeds at the Plant City Airport picked up in the late morning hours of Jan. 31, and were steady in the 20 mph range with gusts in the upper 30 mph range overnight and into the early morning hours of Feb. 1.<\/p>\n
Temperatures that fell to freezing by 1 a.m. Feb. 1 were as low as 20 degrees overnight and didn\u2019t rise above freezing until after 9 a.m.<\/p>\n
The combination created a serious challenge for farmers like Wright, Clay Keel of Keel Farms and Royce Grant of Lutz Blueberry Farm. The sprinklers must run constantly, and the water must coat the plants evenly in order to prevent the temperature underneath the ice from dropping below 32 degrees.<\/p>\n
That made for a long night for Wright and his crew. He and 10 of his employees walked up and down the rows all night long monitoring the sprinklers, knocking ice off them when they froze over and wouldn\u2019t turn, unclogging lines filled with debris from the wells, and replacing broken sprinkler heads.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t go to bed,\u201d he said. \u201cI mean, all it takes is one mistake and it\u2019s gone \u2014 everything you\u2019ve worked for is gone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Grant and Keel both said they didn\u2019t even bother turning the sprinklers on that night. They said icing blueberry plants in those winds will just make it worse.<\/p>\n
\u201cDefinitely, you cannot freeze protect on blueberries at those winds because it\u2019ll damage \u2014 once the ice forms, then you have sails on the plant, right?\u201d Keel said. \u201cAnd the wind will damage the plant, break branches and just basically destroy the plants.\u201d<\/p>\n
Grant agreed, saying, \u201cIt was useless \u2026 so we just have to take the hit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Keel didn\u2019t water his strawberries that night either, because he couldn\u2019t get enough water pressure to keep them coated properly.<\/p>\n
Wright ultimately sacrificed a 2-acre section, turning the sprinklers off there in order to increase the water pressure to the rest of the field.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe crew is going to go over (to that section) and every strawberry that\u2019s on the bush, we\u2019ll just take it off and throw it on the ground,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause that way the plant itself will think, \u2018OK, wait a minute, I don\u2019t have any strawberries.\u2019 If we leave the ones on there, it\u2019ll think, \u2018OK, I\u2019ll keep feeding that strawberry,\u2019 you know, still going. We take them all off \u2014 \u2018Oh, wait a minute, there\u2019s nothing left, let\u2019s make some more.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
That will take approximately six weeks. By then, his commercial market (i.e. grocery stores), which constitutes 95% of his business, will have evaporated.<\/p>\n
\u201c(The demand) will be too low to try and pick for the commercial market and that\u2019s going to be the devastating part of it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He added later: \u201cI would go ahead and keep taking care of them, because we\u2019ll have a U-pick market. You know, we have a viable thing to fall back on, where a lot of farms don\u2019t. But even with our U-pick market this year we\u2019re not going to pay our bills off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Keel and Grant, who both have U-pick operations, were able to water several other nights in order to minimize the damage.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s still hard to quantify,\u201d Keel said. \u201cI think the blueberries are fine. I\u2019m not seeing a lot of damage in the blueberries, which is good. It\u2019s still pretty early in the season.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for the strawberries, they took significant damage because they weren\u2019t able to freeze protect that one night.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny small fruit, especially, and the flowers that were on the strawberries that would have become fruit right now \u2014 it took a lot of damage,\u201d Keel said.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us, if I needed to quantify dollars, it\u2019s probably a few thousand dollars,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s hoping the plants recover in time for their annual Strawberry Bash, which is coming up Feb. 21-22.<\/p>\n
Grant said that he can\u2019t be certain, but he thinks he lost about $6,000 worth. He said he had a lot of flowers open already and once the flowers have bloomed, they\u2019re vulnerable.<\/p>\n
A retired fire fighter, he runs his U-pick farm on U.S. 41 with his wife, Brenda, and his father, Aubrey.<\/p>\n
The elder Grant started it when he retired from the Tampa Fire Department in 1995, after 30 years.<\/p>\n
Royce Grant said they keep running it because everyone loves it so much.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the kids come over from (Lutz Preparatory School), you ought to hear them, just the noise you\u2019ll hear \u2014 you can\u2019t see them sometimes because they\u2019ll be way over there, but just the noises you\u2019re hearing \u2014 they\u2019re joyful.\u201d<\/p>\n
None of the three plan to raise prices to compensate for the loss. They just don\u2019t want to. Wright runs the U-pick fields and the produce stand at his farm, where he also sells a variety of vegetables grown right there on the farm, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, for the pure joy of it.<\/p>\n
He gestured out the window, where dozens of children played and fed the animals. \u201cThat\u2019s all I need,\u201d he said. \u201cLook at all the happy kids running around here. That makes a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
He predicted that strawberry prices in the grocery stores will \u201cgo through the roof\u201d even as theirs, which he argued were already better at $4 per pound, will stay the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re still making money at it,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to gouge anybody. It\u2019s not worth it. We could. But why?\u201d<\/p>\n
All three said the best thing their customers can do to support them during this time is \u201cjust keep coming.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy heart really goes out to those people that this is their livelihood,\u201d Royce Grant said. \u201cYou know, like the strawberry farmers and all in Plant City. Because that\u2019s \u2014 you work all year long to try to get a crop and it don\u2019t take but one night to change everything. And all the farmers all across this country. We need to be thankful for them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"THONOTOSASSA \u2013 Jerry Wright lost half of his crop on his 40-acre strawberry farm, Passion Organics, when the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157460,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[75460,26895,75461,276,1877,75459,66627,75458,135,137,136,75457,4103,221,1268],"class_list":["post-157459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-berry","tag-cold-snap","tag-fire-sprinkler-system","tag-hillsborough-county","tag-ice","tag-passion-organics","tag-physical-geography","tag-strawberry-farm","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news","tag-thonotosassa","tag-water","tag-weather","tag-wind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}