Frosts and freezes have torn through Northern Hemisphere growing regions in recent months, and the impacts are now beginning to be felt across nations’ fields and shelves.
UK VEGETABLES SUPPLIES “DESPERATELY LOW”
The UK suffered a historically cold Spring; in fact, the season was a complete no-show.
Brits shivered through the chilliest April since 1922.
And one of the coldest Mays since CET record-keeping began some 362 years ago, in 1659.
While the European continent as whole also experienced its coldest April in decades.
And now, reports a filtering in of certain vegetable being in “desperately low” supply.
A severe shortage of British asparagus has been reported by thegrocer.co.uk.
According to the publication, this year’s yields have been devastated by a prolonged period of cold weather.
During the past three months, the UK have been exposed to well-below-average temperatures, and two months of drought — these conditions stunted the growth of asparagus plants, which are typically grown in open fields under polythene sheeting.
According to British Asparagus Association chairman Chris Chinnrecord –a club I so want to join– the record cold has meant retailers and wholesalers are now in the “extraordinary” position of having to rely on imports.
This is the first time this has happened since 2013.
“We have been desperately short,” says Chinn, who also farms the crop in Worcestershire.
“Yields are well under half so far compared to an average year. It’s been an absolutely shocking spring season for all crops … we’re supposed to be harvesting asparagus and there’s no opportunity to catch up.”
The asparagus season typically begins in the second half of April but can run no later than the end of June as growers must allow the following season’s crop to develop.
Some supermarkets are already reporting shortages, but the empty shelves are expected to be more noticeable in the weeks ahead.
“Prices have been higher, certainly in the early part of the season,” says Andy Allen, owner of Norfolk-based Portwood Asparagus. “[And] because growers aren’t going to get the tonnages, the prices are likely to go up again fairly soon.”
Allen added that grower costs had also been pushed up due to that ‘virus what was released from the Wuhan lab’–something I first reported on in Jan, 2020: here & here (you can’t censor me for suggesting it anymore FB/Twitter/Google).
For example, continues Allen, social distancing in packhouses had made operations “inefficient.”
Shortages extend to more than just Asparagus, of course, and further than just the UK.
As recently reported by freshplaza.com, the peach and nectarine harvest for the four main growing countries Greece, Spain, Italy and France is forecast to be the lowest in the past 30 years.
Suffering that same COVID/cold combo, “it is certain that there will be a shortage of supply this year,” concludes the FP article.
While grape growing in France was ravaged by historic April freezes.
“It’s a national phenomenon,” said Jérôme Despey at the time, the secretary general of the FNSEA farming union and a winemaker in the Hérault region.
“You can go back in history, there have been [freezing] episodes in 1991, 1997, 2003 but in my opinion it is beyond all of them.”
In the Rhône Valley, the head of the local wine producers’ body, Philippe Pellaton, said it would be “the smallest harvest of the last 40 years”, with losses of 80-90% compared with normal. Winemakers are “shattered, desperate”, he said.
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