Drought Fails to Spoil S.D. Avocado Harvest : Agriculture: Growers end season with about $100 million in gross revenue, California Avocado Commission reports.

By TOM GORMAN

Jan. 21, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Despite the drought and resulting water cutbacks that reduced overall yields from previous years, San Diego County avocado growers enjoyed their fourth good year in a row, the California Avocado Commission reported Monday.

Local growers escaped a devastating freeze that cut heavily into avocado production in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, and ended the 1990-91 season with about $100 million in gross revenue, said Howard Seelye, spokesman for the avocado commission.

Historically, San Diego--where more than 30,000 acres are planted in avocados--produces about half of the state’s avocado crop. In San Diego County, avocados are the second largest cash crop, behind nurseries.

Statewide, avocado growers harvested 271.5 million pounds, the commission reported in its annual audit. The price for all varieties of avocados for 1991 was 71.1 cents per pound--the third highest per-pound price since the commission began keeping records.

In comparison, avocados fetched its growers $1.14 per pound in 1990, when 207 million pounds of avocados were harvested, and 63 cents per pound in 1989, when 330 million pounds of avocados went to market statewide.

The California Avocado Commission, established in 1978 to market California avocados through advertising and promotion, stopped short of assessing what net profits were collected by growers of the so-called green gold.

Avocados have long proved a fickle industry, its yields dictated by the whims of nature’s heat waves, cold snaps, winds and its sales coming at the whims of consumer acceptance, given that the fruit typically is purchased unripened, days before it can be served in a salad, sandwich or dip.

“The $193 million in revenue tells us the industry is profitable in general, but you can’t divide that among the growers,” said Avi Crane, the commission’s vice president for industry affairs. “For growers who were hit by the freeze (in Ventura and Santa Barbara), there was no income, and a lot of growers cut back on their trees because of the drought.”

Ed Malone, one of San Diego County’s largest avocado growers with 350 bearing acres in Poway and another 80 acres in avocados in Escondido, said his gross revenues were down “substantially” from his good years of 1987 and 1988.

“The price (per pound) was good, but the crop size was way down, maybe by 40%,” Malone said. “Some of it is because we cut back on the use of water, and also partly because we had a hot spell just when our trees were setting blossoms that, because of the heat, didn’t hold.

“Overall, we had an OK year,” Malone said. “But if it’s reasonable to expect a 10% return on your investment, we had a lousy year. It wasn’t the kind of return that would encourage anyone to go into the business.”

Malone and others said any given farmer’s measure of a good or bad year comes only after the costs of doing business--the mortgage on the land, capital investments, water costs and the like--are taken into account.

“We’ve been into ranching for quite a while,” Malone said, “so we don’t have a lot of debt.”

Still, he noted, his water bills in Poway, given the loss of his agricultural discount, jumped from $340 an acre foot to $509 an acre foot. During summer months, he said, his water bill was between $15,000 and $20,000.

Gary Bender, an avocado and citrus specialist with the University of California’s farm adviser’s office in San Diego, said most area farmers were pleased by the year’s numbers.

“All in all, yields weren’t too bad, even though there was some heat damage and wind damage,” Bender said. “And the prices weren’t too bad.”

The affect of the water cutbacks, Bender said, were offset somewhat by a milder than usual summer. And some growers, he said, anticipated the water cutback orders.

“Some guys were under-irrigating anyway, so when they were told to cut back 20%, that really hurt their yields,” Bender said. “On the other hand, some of the more professional growers may have been over-irrigating a little bit in anticipation of the drought, so when they were told to cut back 20%, it didn’t really hurt them that much.”

Seelye, the commission spokesman who also grows his own avocados in Fallbrook, said while last year’s yields weren’t as high as the previous three years, they still were outstanding and shouldn’t be considered a serious downtrend.

During the last four years, California growers have received $841.7 million for their avocados, for an annual average of $210.4 million, he noted.

“But in 1987, the industry only did $93.8 million,” Seelye said. “We had a huge avocado crop, but the return per-pound was terrible.”

In 1986--the best year until then--the industry did $162 million in business.

Crane, whose offices are in Santa Ana, said this year’s yield was down somewhat from the previous three years also because many avocado growers thinned out their groves in the course of routine maintenance that they had been putting off.

“Growers need to thin or cut back periodically because, over time, that will yield larger crops. Sunshine is the name of the game and you need to thin the groves,” Crane said. “But over the past few years, a lot of growers have wanted to harvest every piece of fruit they could, so they delayed cutting back trees. Finally, this year--and because of the drought--a lot of them did that.”

The California Avocado Commission has promised to its 6,000 statewide members this year to seek out new markets for the fruit, Crane said.

Radio commercials during next weekend’s Super Bowl will target the Los Angeles market, Crane said. Other promotional campaigns will target the restaurant trade (“everything from fast food to white tablecloth,” Crane said), and Latino and Japanese consumers.

While the commission said it was reluctant to project 1992 figures, Crane said the early January rains were expected to be a boon to avocado growers, and that the 1992 harvest might be 25% greater than 1991’s.

“As a commission, our goal is to increase the demand for avocados so there’s a market for whatever is harvested,” Crane said. “We hope supply will be in line with demand. It’s not like a factory where, based on projections for demand, we produce x-number of widgets. In our business, nature decides how much we produce, and we have to accept it.”

Added a Valley Center avocado grower who asked not to be identified, “It takes the right amount of fertilizer, the right amount of water and the right amount of luck.”

Crane said because of the freeze that hurt Ventura and Santa Barbara farmers, about 75% of the 1992 harvest will probably come from groves in northern San Diego and southern Riverside counties, contrasted with the normal 50-50 split between the two regions.

Avocados typically are harvested a year or more after the fruit is set on the trees in spring, and is picked virtually year-round.