Big Chill Is Pits for Citrus, Avocado Crops

Don Reeder hasn’t slept much the last few nights. The manager of 2,500 acres of avocados and citrus says it has been too cold for comfort.

Reeder, president of Somis Pacific Agricultural Management, has been waiting for that late-night call that tells him the freeze is on, and it’s time to fire up the wind machines, get the irrigation dripping and save crops from the ice that could destroy them.

For the first time in a year, that call came Sunday night. It was 28 degrees in Fillmore. Reeder was up at 12:30 a.m., working to warm a Fillmore orange grove.

In Somis, another grower ran his wind machines all night as a precaution.

After a summer that warmed Ventura County through December, the new year has dawned with a sudden icy chill that threatens citrus and avocado crops throughout the county. And with forecasts for more cold weather, growers are hustling to make sure they are ready for a freeze.

“If it freezes, you don’t have a crop,” Reeder said.

Crops are particularly susceptible to a freeze now, because they have not put on their cold-weather jackets to prepare for winter. The mild weather from the extended summer has confused the trees. Some avocado groves are blooming.

They think it’s still summer, said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. Instead of becoming dormant in mid-October, when the soil around them usually cools, the avocado trees continue to grow new branches and roots and to produce new fruit.

“If you have a freeze when the trees are in that shape, you’ll get smashed,” Reeder said. Growers are bracing for a freeze, but not the “mother of all freezes,” Laird said.

The farm bureau’s meteorologist is forecasting temperatures in the low 30s and high 20s just before sunrise today for valley areas such as Santa Paula and the Upper Ojai, Laird said. After that, the meteorologist expects temperatures to warm today, but remain in the low 30s in pockets of the county.

Growers know their trees are vulnerable, not only because of the late summer, but because the lack of rain has weakened them, Laird said. And the new year’s cold predawn temperatures is a stark reminder that eight hours of subfreezing temperatures could devastate crops.

Time will tell.

“We’re kind of set up for a big fall,” Laird said. “The trees are stressed, and then you get this real hard freeze where it gets down to 26 degrees for seven to eight hours. That’s when you’ll see some major losses.

“The anxiety level is there because the growers know that,” he said. “And they’re just hoping we get some rain so [the trees] get back a little more vigor before we get hit with something.”

Like other growers, Santa Paula rancher Dan Pinkerton sees the long summer as a mixed blessing. Farmers are lucky that a major frost hasn’t hit, he said. But the early blossoms on his avocado trees raise questions about what will happen when the trees are supposed to bloom come spring.

“The question is, what’s going to happen to those trees in April?” he said. “This is a very different year than we’ve seen in the past, so we have to go day by day.”

It hasn’t rained much in the county this year, and hardly at all since mid-December.

It’s been a decade since such scant rainfall left local orchards so vulnerable, said Tom Pecht, who grows avocados and citrus.

Pecht’s 130 acres were frosty Monday morning, but he isn’t concerned the chill will last long enough to do any damage.

“What we’re having now is starting to be normal weather,” he said.