Lettuce Continued from Page 3
Floodwaters inundate farm fields, left, in Monterey County in March. Below, a lettuce crop falls victim to impatiens necrotic spot virus, a plant disease that caused con- siderable losses to the region’s lettuce farmers last year.
growth from the rains, he worries about a return of INSV, which is spread by millimeter-long thrips that feed on vegetation such as weeds and transmit the virus to delicate crops, especially lettuce. “We’ve had it every year for the last five years and we’re already seeing it,” Mason said. “How can we not have it? It’s not a problem we can spray our way out of.” Early intervention and cool tem- peratures, which lasted this year well into the spring, are most effective to control thrips. “Because of the cold, wet weather we had this winter, we are starting the season with a low thrips popula- tion, which should bode well for INSV risks,” said Jennifer Clarke, executive director of the California Leafy Greens Research Board. But there are still concerns as the sea- son progresses. “The wet weather has
Photo/Caleb Hampton
presented challenges in weed manage- ment, and the management of weeds is a critical component to managing INSV,” Clarke said. Kelly of Boutonnet Farms is watching
INSV and the fungus that causes verticil- lium wilt in lettuce, as well as water-mold threats from pythium wilt. Pythium wilt and INSV can join forc- es to impact vast acreages of lettuce. In 2020 and 2022, the combination result- ed in total crop losses for some Salinas Valley lettuce farmers. Those crop threats complicate plant- ing decisions, particularly when adding in flooding impacts, Kelly said. “You go into a year to place crops where they will be best suited to with- stand those pressures, and then you get a flooding event like you had this year and those plans go right out the win- dow,” he said. “There’s ground this year I planned to get two crops on and I may only get one.” Instead of preparing fields in 60 days for a new crop, Kelly’s teams are at- tempting to do it in 15 days, he said. This demands tinkering with blends of fertilizers and pesticides to nurture the new crop while the previous one is still decomposing. “We’re grading on a curve this year,” Kelly said. “We have to look at things through the lens of, ‘Yes, they don’t look as good as I’m normally used to, given an extreme amount of challenges we have to work around.’” Some smaller farmers do not have the same resources to facilitate speedy crop recovery, or any recovery at all, Groot said. “Many of our growers are continuing
to produce on fields that were not im- pacted by flooding, but many small growers and farms are not able to re- cover their losses in the same manner,” Groot said. “Overall, we may experience some financial stress on these small farms as they work to get their fields back into production.” Groot said some smaller operations may have to lease out land to larger ones that can spread out costs over larger acreage. After the string of catastrophic events, Kelly said he is encountering a new chal- lenge in the marketplace: doubt. He is having to assure skeptics as he promises to deliver a successful crop. “We’ve had a couple of folks come to us and say, ‘We don’t think there is any way you can make your (crop) com- mitments with all the damage that has happened,’” Kelly said. “My response has always been, ‘Watch me.’ We didn’t get to where we’re at by being quitters.” Mason of Nature’s Reward also felt the heat in late April as he was moving for- ward with the saturated ground he had to work with. “There comes a time when we run out of ground we can plant and it does worry us,” he said. “But we are getting out in the fields. We are planting. We have contracts to fill for our buyers.” (Caitlin Fillmore is a reporter based in Monterey County. She may be contacted at cslhfillmore@gmail.com.)
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4 Ag Alert May 24, 2023
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