- Author: Ben Faber
What about Planting Lemons in Kern County?
By Craig Kallsen, UC Cooperative Extension Advisor, Kern County
Kern County is located at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley of California. Over the past couple of years, I, as the citrus Farm Advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension in Kern County, have received an increasing number of enquiries about the feasibility of growing lemons here. The answer is “yes” we can grow lemons here and according to the latest Kern County Agricultural Commissioner's Report (2017) we have 4010 acres of bearing and 10 acres of non-bearing lemons in the county. Those 10 acres of non-bearing lemons indicate that fairly recently someone decided lemons were the way to go.
These inquiries as to the feasibility of growing lemons are understandable. The price and demand for lemons in the U.S. and worldwide is increasing. Depending upon where you get your statistics the retail prices of lemons was something like $1.50 per pound from 2011- 2013 to something like $2 a pound from 2015 – 2017. The statistics show 2018 was even a better year for selling lemons. Consumption of lemons in the U.S. was less than 1 million metric tons in 2011 to about 1.25 million metric tons in 2017. Worldwide consumption has increased from about 4.5 million metric tons in 2011 to 5.5 million metric tons in 2017. If you add in other factors such as a heat wave, which, for example, hit Ventura County production hard in July 2018, or extreme winter freeze events, and sometimes-erratic supplies from other lemon producing areas of the world, prices can skyrocket 40% or more in a month. Being able to sell a carton of lemons for excess of $55 can be very attractive to prospective growers. Not surprisingly, if you compare the cost and returns of growing lemons with those of oranges, a person might wonder why anybody would choose producing navels over lemons (see https://coststudies.ucdavis.edu/ ).
Planting lemons is riskier. In the San Joaquin Valley, the major consideration is the greater frost sensitivity of lemons as compared most other citrus crops. Not only do lemons freeze at a higher temperature, so do its branches. A freeze, which can spoil orange or mandarin production for a year, can devastate lemon production for three years due to increased damage to the lemon canopy and the older branches of that canopy. If your tree freezes back to the major scaffold branches, you are out of business for a while. An important question is how often does it cold enough to destroy my lemon production capacity for three years or more? Industry wide, for the last 30 years we have had three freezes where lemon leaf canopies, even in the warmer areas of Kern County, were severely damaged – December 1990- January 1991, December 1998, and January 2007. Not to be an alarmist but, in looking at these dates, it would appear that we may be overdue for an extreme freeze. We flirted with one in early December of 2013. Over the years, I have noticed that as the time interval increases from the previous frost event, citrus orchards move further and further down onto the valley floor, only to retreat to higher ground after the next severe event.
Well, what about global warming? Shouldn't Kern County be getting to be a safer place to grow lemons? In answer, predictions can be difficult, and according to baseball legend Yogi Berra, this is especially so if they are about the future. Winter air temperatures have been climbing over the past 30 years in the southern San Joaquin Valley. With our Mediterranean climate in the SJV, most of our rain falls during the fall and winter. Drought years, which means drought winters, have become more common. The higher winter temperatures are good news for citrus growers, but the droughts have been bad news in that dry air in not conducive for fog formation. Fog, historically, is our winter blanket, that holds temperatures above freezing when conditions are ripe for rapid drops in temperature associated with clear, windless nights following cold fronts that move into the valley from Alaska and other points north.
The risk in growing lemons can be mitigated. As with any real estate endeavor, the three most important factors governing the value of a prospective lemon property are location, location and location. When we are talking about cold temperatures, we are talking about nighttime low air temperatures. Daytime winter temperatures, once we get into mid-morning, usually, are more than warm enough to keep lemons from freezing. The major mitigation factor under human control is to plant lemons in the areas of Kern County that have the warmest nighttime temperatures. These areas tend to be on the lower slopes of the foothills on the eastern and southern areas of the SJV. Cold air is much heavier than warm air and runs like a river downslope. Good cold drainage is necessary. If lemons are planted too far out onto the valley floor, they end up at the bottom of a lake of cold air during late fall and winter freeze events. The area where citrus is grown, often, is referred to as a belt along the lower foothills of the SJV. Not only is this belt characterized by more fog than higher up in the foothills, but also it is close to the atmospheric inversion layer that forms in the SJV during the winter. The SJV is at the bottom of a large deep bowl formed by surrounding mountain ranges, and the depth of this bowl makes the air more difficult to disturb by wind. This still air, on cold, clear nights during the winter, allows heat radiating into the sky from the ground to warm a layer of air, usually located from 500 to 1000 feet above the valley floor. The idea of using wind machines successfully is to move this layer of warm air down to the trees on the ground. If you are down on the valley floor, on most nights the warmer air is way too high up to bring it down to the ground with wind machines. If an orchard is 500 feet above the valley floor on the side of a foothill, you might already be in the inversion layer and won't even need to start your wind machines, or at worst, the inversion layer is close enough to bring that warm air down to the trees with wind machines. Unfortunately, the amount of land winter-warm enough for growing lemons in the foothills is very limited, and, currently, is occupied by other crops, probably citrus. We cannot grow lemons too high up in the foothills, because these areas are above the inversion layer and winter temperatures there will always be too cold for lemons. Kern County, in general, appears to be colder than its neighbor Tulare County to the north, and usually suffers more in terms of fruit and tree losses during extreme frost events.
Those bold enough to grow lemons appear to have more choices on which lemon to grow now than in the past. Some newer seedless or lower-seeded lemon varieties are available (https://citrusvariety.ucr.edu/ ). The Lisbon lemons, of which there are several selections, is an old Kern County standby, and appears to have better frost tolerance than the Eureka, commonly grown in the central and southern coastal areas. The Improved Meyer lemon is a hybrid, apparently, with citron, mandarin and pummelo heritage, and has excellent frost tolerance. However, the fruit does not hold up well on the tree, in storage or ship very well, and few commercial groves exist. It remains a very popular and successful backyard tree for homeowners.
With the threat of the Asian Citrus Psyllid (ACP) and the Huanglongbing disease it spreads, the feasibility of growing citrus under protective screens (CUPS) is under investigation. These protective screens, in addition to keeping ACP out, would likely provide additional frost protection as well.
The other obvious concern related to the number of enquiries I have received, is that even if lemons are not widely grown in Kern County now, worldwide demand suggests that there are likely many new acres of lemons in the ground now or in advanced planning stages in other locations in California, Arizona and the world. In the past, we have seen the acreage of a number of crop commodities rise and fall with the laws of supply and demand. We have planted and then pulled lemons in Kern County before based on market conditions. At some point, even unfrozen lemons will not sell if there are too many out there.
Figure 1. Frozen mature lemon trees in photo background, after the 1998 freeze in the Edison area of Kern County. Juvenile, undamaged navel orange trees in foreground (photo by Craig Kallsen).
- Author: Ben Faber
It's winter time and avocados and other subtropicals are prone to frost damage. Little trees especially that haven't developed a canopy that can trap heat are the most prone. So it gets cold and all the orchard looks fine, but there's one tree that doesn't look right and in a couple of days it really stands out.
Here's an example of a year old tree that turned brown and it actually looks like it was doing better than the trees surrounding. It's bigger and has a fuller canopy..... or at least it did.
But there's all the symptoms of frost damage - bronzed leaves and dead tips.
A week after the cold weather, there is already sunburn damage on the exposed stems. See the brown spots on the upper fork? That will soon turn all brown and dry up.
This is still a healthy tree with green stems, in spite of the burned leaves. Now is the time to protect the tree from sunburn damage. This is what can kill the little tree. Time to white wash it.
Why did it happen to this one tree? Maybe it was a little bigger and needed more water than the surrounding trees. Maybe sitting on a rock and didn't have enough rooting volume for water. Maybe a touch of root rot (although the roots looked pretty good even for winter time). And there were ground squirrels in the area. Easy to bklamne them.
Listen to the sound of winter frost control
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwTJveN8cIE
And when freeze damage gets extreme
https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=16448
- Author: Ben Faber
Interested in San Joaquin Valley Avocados?
When: NOVEMBER 28, Tuesday, 1PM
Where:
UC Lindcove Research and Extension Center Conference Room (22963 Carson Ave, Exeter, CA 93221), Central Valley.
Tentative Program:
Welcome and Introductions – Mary Lu Arpaia, UC Riverside
Challenges to growing avocados in the Valley
Irrigation, Fertilization and Soil Requirements – Ben Faber, UCCE, Ventura County
Avocado Root Rot and how to manage – Greg Douhan, UCCE, Tulare County
What is the California Avocado Commission and the Hass Avocado Board? – Tim Spann, California Avocado Commission, Irvine, CA
Results from the Tier 3 varietal evaluation block at UC Lindcove REC – Mary Lu Arpaia and Eric Focht, UC Riverside
Ideas for the Valley Avocado Industry – Group Discussion
Walkthrough of the Tier 3 varietal evaluation block
RSVP to Diana Nix (dlnix@ucanr.edu)
For more information contact Mary Lu Arpaia (mlarpaia@ucanr.edu)
- Author: Jeanette Warnert
California avocados are the best in the world. So says downtown restaurant manager Daniel Avalos in a Valley Public Radio story by reporter Ezra David Romero.
The fact that they currently thrive only on a small swath of coastal Southern California is being challenged by UC Cooperative Extension specialist Mary Lu Arpaia. She is on a mission to find avocado varieties that withstand the hot summers and cold winters of the San Joaquin Valley, where irrigation water and crop land are more abundant and cheaper.
She hopes to find avocado varieties that ripen at various times of year, and varieties that might be an alternative crop for citrus growers should huanglongbing, a disease that has devastated the Florida citrus crop, take hold in Central California.
"There's a void of California fruit on the market in the months of November, December and actually early January," Arpaia said. "So if we can find different selections that maybe are unique that fit into that window, then we help the entire California avocado industry."
An as-yet unnamed avocado variety.
Romero visited the UC Lindcove Research and Extension Center to see the trees in Arpaia's study. Currently, the vast majority of California avocados are the Hass variety. The goal is to breed varieties with similar eating quality that grow to a moderate height and have high yield. One potential that is already being produced by nurseries is called "gem."
"This is gem," said Eric Focht, a staff research associate in Arpaia's lab. "You can see it's a little more oval or egg shaped than Hass. It has the speckling on the skin. Now as this ripens, it will turn dark and a lot of times the speckled lenticels with get a yellow kind of golden color it it."
Another promising variety is called "lunchbox" because of its small size. According to Focht, it "just falls out of the skin." Arpaia said, "It makes wonderful guacamole and I found, with a non-replicated test in my refrigerator, the fruit doesn't brown."
Arpaia's favorite guacamole recipe is featured at the end of the story on the KVPR website. And there is more on this story at:
Mary Lu Arpaia
- Author: Ben Faber
It is that time of year and we should be alert to threat of freezing weather and damage to trees. Last winter was one of the warmest on record, but there was still a sneak cold blast around the New Year that caused some problems in some areas. Wet winters tend to have lower frost threats, and even though wet is forecast for this winter, that rain is not forecast until late in January. That still leaves December and early January which historically when most of our damaging frosts occur. Fox Weather on the CA Avocado Commission is forecasting some cold weather coming up, so growers need to be prepared for the worst.
Here are some links to frost information, preparing for frost and managing frost damage to trees.
A Frost Primer
http://ceventura.ucanr.edu/Com_Ag/Subtropical/Publications/Frost/A_Frost_Primer_-_2002_/
Protecting Avocados from Frost
Rehabilitation of Freeze-Damaged Citrus and Avocado Trees
The forecast is for north winds, which often means cold, dry air and often with winds. Winds mean no inversion and no warm air that can be introduced at ground level to warm trees. If this occurs, running a wind machine can make the damage worse. Wind machines and orchard heaters work on the principle of mixing that warmer air higher up – 20-100 or so feet higher than ground level which has colder air. When temperatures drop, the air is dry (wet-bulb temp below 28 deg F) and there is no inversion, running a wind machine can just stir up cold air and cause worse conditions (freeze-drying). It's better to not run the machine. The only thing left to do is to run the microsprinklers during the day so that the water can absorb the day's heat. Then turn the water off before sunset so that evaporative cooling from the running water isn't accentuated. Then when temperatures drop near 32 at night and the dewpoint is much below that, it's time to start the water again and let it run until sunrise (when risk is less). Running water works even if the water freezes. This is due to the release of heat when water goes from liquid to frozen state. This 1-2 degrees can mean the difference between frost damage and no damage. Also, ice on fruit and leaves can insulate the fruit. As the ice melts at the surface of the plant, it releases heat, protecting the plants. If there is not sufficient water to run the whole orchard, it's best to pick out the irrigation blocks that are the coldest or the ones you definitely want to save and run the water there continuously. Running the water and turning it off during the night to irrigate another block can lead to colder temperatures in both blocks.
Keep warm this winter.