Crops

"Every cucumber in the state of Florida is gone, from what I understand," Tom Burgin, a produce broker in Plant City, said after a devastating weekend freeze caused some of the worst crop damage in a decade for central Florida vegetable growers. Cold-sensitive crops--cucumbers, watermelons and squash--suffered severe damage. For tomatoes, it was also the worst freeze in 10 years, said Bill Butler, a vegetable broker in Hillsborough who ships to major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles.

Temperatures dipped Friday to record lows from Idaho to Illinois to Texas on the last full day of summer, with a crop-killing freeze that damaged soybeans, corn and other grains. Among the record-setting readings for the date was a temperature of 29 in Concordia, Kan., nine degrees below the old mark of 38 set in 1974. Kansas City, Mo., had a reading of 31 and Lincoln, Neb., dipped to 27.

A prolonged dry spell has seized the Northeast, withering crops and sucking rivers and lakes so dry that Baltimore has only a month's worth of drinking water in its reservoirs. Maryland declared the first drought emergency in its history Friday, joining Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware and scores of communities in urging people and businesses to curb water use. The Saharan summer is so worrisome that forecasters are rooting for a tropical storm. Better yet, two.

Recent rains have smashed strawberries, assaulted artichokes and bruised broccoli, inflicting more than $65 million in damage on California farmers so far, the state Department of Food and Agriculture said Tuesday. And growers are bracing for more in the next few days, as two new storms packing fierce winds bear down on the state.

The nation's corn and soybean crop, hurt by severe drought but benefiting from late summer rains, will be good but not great, according to grain market experts who toured major producing states this week. "I think the main thing we found was that while the total harvest for the Midwest may not be as good as last year, 1991 is definitely not going to be a repeat of the 1988 drought crop," said Jim Quinton of Crop Information Associates, a consulting group that sponsored the tour.

The wine grape harvest in California's north coast is either a disaster or one of the best on record, depending on where the winery is located or the grape variety. Until mid-September, a long, cool growing season--which roughly lasts from spring to fall--had led agricultural experts to estimate that grapes on the vine would be 40% to 50% higher in tonnage than last year with exceptionally high quality.

Sheriff's detectives Mike Horne and Eric Nelson spent more than a few nights last December crouched deep in the orchards of Santa Paula under the cloak of nightfall. They were watching, waiting for a thief who never came. They had reason to suspect one might because, for weeks, several hundred pounds of the ranchers' most profitable product--avocados--had been snapped from treetops and carted off.

Florida's $9 billion-a-year citrus crop escaped major damage from an Arctic blast that brought rare snow flurries to Cape Canaveral and shattered record lows as far south as Miami Beach. Though the mercury dipped as low as 15 degrees in Panama City Beach and 19 degrees in Jacksonville, citrus growers said temperatures in the prime growing region farther south did not fall below 28 degrees for more than four hours, the threshold for damage.

Peru, the world's No. 2 cocaine producer, said the amount of Peruvian land devoted to growing coca -- the drug's raw material -- was at its lowest in 20 years. A surge in voluntary eradication in the last quarter of 2003 helped Peru scrap 27,965 acres of illegal coca crop last year, said Nils Ericsson, the country's anti-drug chief. "With that reduction, the total amount of coca areas is [77,000 acres], the lowest in the last 20 years," he said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it may create a voluntary system to verify whether shipments of crops were genetically altered. The move comes as the U.S. begins market-opening talks with its World Trade Organization partners, many of which oppose or are ambivalent about biotech crops. Under the proposed industry-funded system, companies could choose to detail to the USDA how they keep products separate from gene-altered crops at all levels of the food chain.