WESLACO — Low market prices, the drought, urbanization, and a looming virus are important issues too serious to ignore, but as the 1997-98 citrus season ends in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, industry leaders are looking on the bright side.
“Fruit quality was excellent, more fruit was sold to the more lucrative fresh fruit market this year than last, and our exports to Canada more than doubled,” said Ray Prewett, executive vice president of Texas Citrus Mutual in Mission.
Final figures are still being tabulated, but Prewett said at least 8.4 million 40-pound cartons of citrus were sold as fresh fruit, versus 8 million cartons last year.
“The orange crop was up considerably and the total citrus crop for this year was about what it was last year,” he said. “But because we had a better packout, we actually shipped more fresh fruit this year than last.”
Packout refers to the fruit sold for fresh market, as opposed to that sold for juice, a market that provides little if any net return to the grower, thanks to an oversupply of juice inventories.
“Low returns for juice has been a problem for years, and until this year, so were low returns for choice fruit,” said Prewett, “but we saw some improvement in our choice fruit returns this year.”
Prewett said that until growers are paid and surveys taken, it’s too early to declare the just completed season an overall economic improvement over last year. But what is apparent from preliminary figures is that export totals showed a marked improvement.
Grapefruit sales to Canada increased by 118 percent, according to Bob Thorton, executive vice president of TexaSweet Citrus Marketing, Inc., a commodity promotional group.
“Before the two freezes of the 1980s, Canada was very big on Texas grapefruit,” said Thorton. “And now we’re seeing that our Rio Star and Ruby Sweet grapefruit are also very popular there. In fact, they’re preferred over Florida citrus. So while we were very successful in Canada this year, we’ve applied for three times the amount of funding for promotion and advertising to target those areas in Canada where we think we can improve sales.”
TexaSweet targeted five areas of Canada for promotions and retail merchandising, four of which finished in the top 30 markets for Valley citrus.
Shipments to Phoenix, Ariz., Thorton said, increased by 167 percent after a TexaSweet billboard campaign and heavy merchandising efforts in that area.
“We can’t take total credit for the success of the grapefruit.”
The other nine top marketing areas include Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Denver, Sacramento, and Chicago.
Prewett says the success of next year’s Valley citrus crop will depend to a great extent on the availability of water, either in rainfall or irrigation.
“We had a great fruit set in March,” he said, “so we’ve got the making of a very good crop if we can get some moisture. If not, we could start losing some of that fruit set. We’ve got isolated groves under severe water stress, but we haven’t heard of any substantial acreage under severe stress. Some water districts are either out of water or close to being out, but a lot of growers have made arrangements to buy water and some still have some left.”
At about 33,000 acres, the Valley’s citrus acreage remains stable, says Prewett, with a limited amount of new plantings adding to the acreage, while urbanization reduces it.
“We’re losing a little acreage to urbanization, and it looks as if long-term we’ll lose a lot to urbanization, but I’d characterize it as stable right now,” he said.
Another plus for Valley citrus this year, Prewett said, were successful lobbying efforts by the National Citrus Research Council to obtain almost $1 million from Congress to fund scientific research of the brown citrus aphid and the devastating tree disease it spreads, the citrus tristeza virus.
As part of a major effort to combat the virus and aphid, Prewett also cited the recent planting of the virus-free citrus budwood foundation block at the Texas A&M-Kingsville Citrus Center in Weslaco from which all new citrus budwood will originate in the future. The Citrus Center also planted many new alternative rootstock studies which show a higher resistance to the citrus tristeza virus than the sour orange rootstocks currently used in almost all Valley citrus trees.
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