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Nurseries, Vegetable Growers Report Agricultural Devastation

Posted on: Thursday, 27 October 2005, 21:00 CDT

By Glenn Singer, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Oct. 27--Melodye Abell surveyed damage to her Lake Worth plant nursery on Wednesday and described the scene in a word to be repeated by scores of others in the South Florida agriculture industry: "Devastating."

"A tornado must have come through here. It ripped the roof off our shop and sucked up all the plants in its path," said Abell, whose Abell's Nursery has survived frosts, windstorms, and hurricanes for 29 years. "This was the worst of them all."

She hopes to be open again by the weekend, but has agreed to sell off her 45-acre sales area to home builder Toll Brothers. Next year, the retail nursery will move onto 4 1/2 acres across the street, facing dozens of new upscale houses.

"We had a dream, we achieved it. Now it's time to scale down," said Abell's daughter, Amanda, a graduate student who has spent time at the nursery since she could walk and worked there for years. "There will be a lot less stress."

From Belle Glade and Delray Beach to Davie and Homestead, nursery owners and produce growers reported the same impact from Hurricane Wilma, saying their inventories and crops largely were destroyed. Officials said it was too soon to estimate the losses in dollars, but they concurred the figure would be in the hundreds of millions.

Damage to agricultural interests "could total $100 million alone in Broward County," said Fred Segal, president of the Broward County Farm Bureau. "A large number of nurseries were severely damaged and many were under water. Shade houses were blown away. Plants are damaged or gone."

Reports filtering in to the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs indicated widespread damage in all hurricane impact areas. Sugar cane in the Clewiston area flattened. Beehives in Homestead blown away. Vegetable processing plants throughout South Florida damaged and disabled.

The timing for growers couldn't have been worse since many of the plants only had been in the ground since August or September. The hurricane also blew off or flooded the plastic mulch on which the beds of vegetables are planted.

One result, experts said, is that the price of some vegetables could more than double for the next two months as a result of the flooded fields and wind damage.

Growers who replant destroyed crops probably won't be able to bring their produce to market for another two months, causing a temporary shortage of tomatoes and peppers. Florida provides more than half of the nation's fresh vegetables between November and February, agriculture officials said.

"As the supermarkets come to expect those tomatoes and don't get them, those prices are going to rise," said Ray Gilmer, a spokesman for the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association.

After last year's Hurricane Charley ruined Florida vegetable crops, the prices of tomatoes went from $1.50 to $2 a pound to as much as $4 to $5 a pound. But prices didn't go back down right away, even after the Florida crop returned to normal in early January.

Last year, hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jean caused $2 billion to $3 billion in damage to crops and infrastructure. The U.S. Department of Agriculture paid Florida growers about $600 million last year as compensation for their losses, said Terry McElroy, a spokesman for the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Much of the damage to the vegetable crops was expected to be caused not only by winds but by flooded fields. Vegetable plants start to perish if faced with standing water in their fields for more than two or three days.

"The plants are drowning right now. The problem is, there's nowhere for the water to go," said John Dunckelman, associate director of the University of Florida's Southwest Florida Research and Education Center in Immokalee. "The vegetables are very sensitive. If we don't get the water out in a day or two, they're gone ... and then it's going to be quite a time before we recover."

Also hit hard by Wilma were ornamental nurseries in Miami-Dade County and citrus trees in Hendry and Collier counties, two of the state's largest citrus-producing counties. Both counties have about 130,000 acres of citrus. Preliminary reports showed that in some areas up to 15 percent of the fruit crop was blown off trees, according to the Florida Citrus Mutual, the state's largest citrus growers group.

The hurricane also destroyed Florida's only coffee farm, wiping out hundreds of trees in the field and 5,000 more in pots at the Wagon Wheel Coffee farm in Davie.

"We viewed this as a potential new crop for South Florida. But now it's all gone. The plants in the ground are all stripped of leaves, and they're all gone," said J.C. Nadeau, the farm owner.

"Every time I pull one from the ground, my heart beats so loud I feel like I'm throwing away a child."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Source: South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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