Lemons will be kicking off the Turkish citrus season. According to Coskun Eren of Turkish produce exporter Eren, the start of the lemon season is still a couple of weeks away: “Our first item of the citrus season will be the Meyer lemons. The product is almost ready for harvest, we expect the export permit to be given around 5-10 September. This can deviate by some days, but we’re definitely close. Later on, we’ll continue with the Interdonato Lemons, towards the end of September, Star Ruby grapefruits, Dobeshi and Mihowase Mandarines, and Fukumato and Navelina oranges towards the beginning of October.”
After having a relatively low season in terms of volumes, Eren is expecting a much better year. Not just for the Turkish growers, but for the Spanish origins as well. “The volumes for the lemons are mixed, with Meyers having good volume and Interdonato lemons having average volumes this season compared to last year. Overall I believe we will have a better volume compared to last year. But this is almost always the case, as last year was exceptionally low quantities. I believe this year Spain also has a bigger crop, so we are on track.”
Temperatures have touched the 50 degrees Celsius mark in some parts of Turkey. According to Eren, this had an impact on the cultivation as well, although not as huge as one might expect: “The heatwave in Turkey is a real problem this August. On a normal day, if you had temperatures around 38-39C you would feel lucky, as temperatures sometimes got to 44C or even 46C in the Mersin and Adana regions. Some days you couldn't even go outside, let alone do work outside. This obviously affected the crop in terms of cultivation speed and color. The very early lemons are more yellow than usual and the early start of the season got delayed around 5-10 days. Normally, compared to previous years, we should have started this week but the hot weather pushed the timing back a little bit. We’re waiting for the product to get some more size in the field. This is not a big deal, as we have the means to deal with lighter color in our facility.”
Eren acknowledges that some days it was too hot to have workers outside in the fields. However, usually the harvesting of the day was done before noon, avoiding the hottest parts of the day, Eren explains. “Of course, some days we couldn't send people to work outside for obvious reasons, but most of the harvest is almost finished before noon, so the effects of the heatwave are mitigated on the important tasks. The work may be slower than usual, but it is not anything like stopping production or altering our volumes.”
Heavy competition is expected this year, as the other origins around the Mediterranean are expecting large crops as well, Eren says: “Our biggest competitor is obviously Spain, then comes Italy and Greece and finally South Africa and Argentina in order. Spain should have a larger crop this year, about the same as us, so the competition will be high. If Spain has a bigger crop, usually Italy and Greece have a larger crop as well, unless some absurd event happened there. So this year all consumers will be eating lemon.”
Eren has high hopes that this season will be a much better one than last year’s season was. “Last year was hard, struggling to find products, prices were high, and demand was unstable. This year we expect a much normal season where things are more predictable. We have a good crop, and a good crop rarely results in a bad outcome. We have the means to manage the heat and we are ready for production which will start very soon. This year we also added a state-of-the-art photographic quality sorting machine to our arsenal to reduce human error and speed up production. This should allow us to achieve exact quality specifications, without sacrificing production capacity. We are already midway through all our retail lemon programs and are currently finalizing them,” he concludes.
For more information:
Coskun Eren
Eren
Tel: +90 533 695 5802
Email: coskun@erentarim.com
www.freshanatolia.com