Mexico: Produce season no longer over by May
there are two main reasons for this - in a nutshell supply and demand. Supply is easier now as there is more greenhouse cultivation and demand is increased thanks to US-Mexico trade arrangements.
"The traditional end of the season is sort of blurring now," said Allison Moore, spokesperson for the Nogales-based Fresh Produce Association of the Americas. "Fifteen years ago people would think the season was October to April or May. And that was it. Now we’re seeing watermelons, grapes, squash, tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, all those things are still crossing."
Nogales is perfectly placed to judge the situation, located as it is on the international border, between the US market and Mexico's Pacific Coast - a prime growing area.
The local produce industry has grown steadily since 1998, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Market News Portal. In that year, the earliest for which data is available, 3.7 billion pounds of produce came through Nogales. Last season, that number grew to 4.6 billion pounds. The peak season during that period was 2009, with 5.09 billion pounds.
"When we started changing from open fields to greenhouses, that’s when we began starting earlier and ending later," said Alberto Maldonado, general manager of Plain Jane Produce, a grower headquartered in Nogales that provides tomatoes, cucumbers and colored peppers. All of the more than 700 acres of the company’s growing area in the Mexican states of Nayarit and Sinaloa are protected by greenhouses.
Maldonado is not alone in his conversion to greenhouses. The USDA data show that in 2002, the earliest year that greenhouse data was available, 97.5 million pounds of produce from greenhouses came through Nogales. That number jumped to more than 718 million pounds in 2011.
Crop diversity is also playing its part - mangoes and grapes for example, are becoming increasingly a part of the scene.
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