Naples Daily News

October 29, 2005

Wilma an 'agriculture disaster' to Collier, Hendry counties

By LAURA LAYDEN

In Immokalee, agriculture drives the economy.

It provides tens of thousands of jobs for year-round residents and migrant workers. But the industry and the small town have been turned upside down by Hurricane Wilma.

The storm flooded vegetable fields. It blew over citrus trees and knocked fruit to the ground. It destroyed packing houses and ripped apart greenhouses, tearing up tender young vegetable plants that had yet to be planted.

Wilma flattened the Pinhookers Market off New Market Road, where entrepreneurs sell a hodgepodge of produce they glean from local farmers.

The storm ripped the roofs off buildings at the State Farmers' Market — the hub for vegetable packing in Immokalee. Some of the buildings have no walls and there's still no electricity.

At Immokalee Produce Shippers, the packing house is one of only a few to survive Wilma. It even has power again. But owner Rich Levine isn't exactly smiling.

His company had 350 acres of tomatoes and other winter vegetables in the ground. Much of it is wiped out — so there won't be much of anything to send to the packing house.

Levine doesn't expect to harvest anything until the end of the year. He said it could be six weeks before he can find more plants to put in the ground.

"There's nothing to replant," Levine said. "Everything is destroyed. There are no plants anywhere, except the few we had put away."

If there's anything that everyone seems to agree on about Wilma is that she was democratic in her damage to the agriculture industry in Collier and Hendry counties.

In the two counties, vegetable losses alone could be in the hundreds of millions, said Gene McAvoy, a regional vegetable agent with the Hendry County Extension office in LaBelle. Citrus losses easily could add up to a half billion dollars, he said.

"It's an agriculture disaster," McAvoy said. "It could not have come at a worse time if you planned it."

Besides tomatoes, the region's fall vegetable crop includes eggplant, cucumbers, peppers and squash. As the storm approached, there were more than 15,000 acres of vegetable plants in the ground in Southwest Florida worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

"We are probably looking at a 60 percent loss of the fall vegetable crop," McAvoy said. "Lots of things are a 100 percent loss. A few of the younger fields were badly battered and can probably grow out and do something."

Though some growers have insurance on their crops, they don't expect to see much compensation for damage caused by Wilma. Typically, insurance will not even cover half the losses from a hurricane, McAvoy said.

Southwest Florida provides much of the nation's fresh vegetables between November and February. It's often called the winter vegetable capital of the nation.

Citrus is also big in Southwest Florida. For citrus, grapefruit took the biggest hit, with as much as 80 percent of the fruit on the ground at some groves in Hendry and Collier counties.

Some groves in the region lost more than 70 percent of their early and midseason oranges and 50 percent to 60 percent of the Valencia crop is on the ground, McAvoy said.

"We've had a lot of fruit and (a) lot of trees turned over," said John Hoffman, citrus manager for Barron Collier Cos. in Immokalee. "It was bad."

Barron Collier Cos. is one of Southwest Florida's larger citrus growers, with more than 9,000 acres of groves.

For citrus growers, there's no making up for lost fruit this season.

"Whatever is left is left," McAvoy said. "The next crop will be in October."

For the past three days, McAvoy has visited vegetable farms in and around Immokalee to survey damage. He's seen watermelon and bean fields that are destroyed.

"I saw some grape tomatoes that were 4 foot high already and they were just twisted up and the whole mess was laying in the mud in between the rows and there were water weeds floating on top of them," he said. "So that's gone. That's not coming back."

He describes the mood of growers as somber.

Much of the destruction in Southwest Florida is in Immokalee, where the population nearly doubles in the height of season, when migrant workers come to town to harvest a variety of crops. The town's year-round population is about 20,000.

"There is a tremendous amount of damage," said Benny Starling, executive director of the Immokalee Chamber of Commerce. "We are just in hopes that some of the growers will be able to replant and maybe be able to get something back in the ground."

Jamie Williams, farm director for Six Ls, a large tomato grower in Immokalee, isn't too optimistic about salvaging the tomato crop that was in the ground as Wilma approached. He doesn't expect to replant anything for the winter season.

"The tomato industry is just disabled," Williams said. "The greenhouses that supply us plants are destroyed. The crop in the field is destroyed. It's a very, very bleak situation."

He estimates there could be a 90 percent loss of tomato production in Immokalee because of Wilma.

"There's just enough there to give you hope that you'll have something to pick," Williams said.

Growers had as much as $10,000 to $12,000 an acre invested in the most mature tomato plants, which were only weeks away from harvesting.

In some fields there were 15 to 18 inches of rain, on top of the 100-plus mph winds that pummeled the plants for hours on Monday, Williams said.

The plants Wilma destroyed would have come to market between November and January.

Williams expects tomato prices to be $50 a box in a month. That's for a 25-pound box of round tomatoes.

After last year's hurricanes ruined some tomato crops in Florida, tomato prices increased to as much as $5 a pound.

"We saw record prices last year," said McAvoy, the regional vegetable agent. "I would anticipate we will see the same."

He also expects to see a spike in prices for other winter vegetables, such as peppers and corn because they'll be in much shorter supply.

Tony DiMare, vice president of DiMare and Co., which grows tomatoes in Immokalee, Homestead and Palmetto/Ruskin, said for his company the Immokalee crop will be a "salvage deal."

"We are in the cleanup mode," he said. "As you can imagine, a lot of workers were displaced. We are trying to get everybody back to the farm to start cleaning up."

He said the plastic under the plants and the drip irrigation was torn up. Stakes also have been pulled out of the ground. All that will have to be fixed before planting can begin again.

"With all the hurricanes that we had last year, I think personally the scope of the damage out of Wilma exceeds the four storms combined," DiMare said. "It affected more of agriculture and it came at a time of year when we were all planted."

Still, DiMare said he's not about to give up on the tomato business. The grower plans to plant the normal spring crop.

"We will survive but not without sustaining losses," DiMare said.

Tim Nance, director of operations in the eastern United States for Gargiulo, one of the largest tomato growers in Collier County, said Wilma hurt several thousand acres of the company's tomatoes. The largest plants took the hardest hit.

He said the surviving plants are getting sunburned because the leaves have been blown off.

"It's going to be a distressed crop," he said. "Even the stuff that is marketable is not going to be first quality. It's going to be a storm-damaged crop."

Gargiulo also owns TransGro, which supplies tomato and green pepper plants to local farmers. About 25 percent of those young plants were lost to the storm, Nance said.

The greenhouses at TransGro have structural damage.

"We are trying to straighten up what remains," Nance said. "We are trying to spray the crops to make sure we don't get a tremendous amount of disease on the damage. There's always more disease when you have damaged crops."

He said there's plenty of work to be done during the cleanup. But he worries about what's to come.

"It's a tremendous impact to our work force," he said. "They were expecting to begin harvesting on Nov. 15. They are not going to have the fruit to pick in a normal year and that is tough."

Starling, with the Immokalee Chamber, said the biggest impact from the storm will be seen in a few weeks when the crops are straightened out. Then the migrant workers are going to be left without a lot to do.

"A lot of people have called," he said. "They are wanting to come out and feed people but I really see a huge need three, four or five weeks down the line when there is going to be a lot of people that are really going to be hurting because they are not going to have jobs."

Growers are complaining about a shortage of workers for cleanup, said McAvoy, the regional vegetable agent.

A shortage of labor already was a concern going into the season because some of the work force has gone to the Gulf Coast to help with recovery from hurricanes Rita and Katrina.

Now, more of them could be drawn from Immokalee to Naples to help out with cleanup and rebuilding.