Produce is following the sun. Here’s a look at how the Yuma-Salinas transition is going this year:<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Josh Ruiz, GM of Cold Crops, Lettuce & Celery for Tanimura & Antle<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Transition began last week in the San Joaquin Valley with iceberg lettuce and a little bit of the mixed items. Broccoli and cauliflower began several weeks ago in the Salinas area, and Oxnard for celery began last week as well. In the San Joaquin Valley at the start of the transition, we had some pretty good rain just a few days before harvest and any time you get over an inch of rain on these lettuce items, there’s always a little potential for problems to show up. At this time, we haven’t seen much of anything. Quality remains good, and weather is back to “normal” at this point. The transition is going to be smooth, and supply should continue to be good. There are no hiccups in our supply over the next couple of weeks and we don’t foresee any major issues at this point.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Merritt Bruce, Director of National Accounts for Growers Express<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">We’ll be moving all of our major crops in the Yuma area up to the Salinas area. That transition will happen now through the early part of April. The weather has been a little unusual, we’ve actually had some very warm days, but just recently, some very cold mornings as well. We’re finding many items to be about a week late to get started in the north but finishing somewhat on time. There’s a little bit of a mixed bag among all the areas and all the different products. Overall, we’ve had ample supplies and expect to have ample supplies as we finish the transition to Salinas. We seem to have very good supplies going into the Easter pull. There’s a little bit of a lower volume on some items, but we’ve had more than normal supplies. So far, we expect the Easter pool to work very well.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Steve Church, CEO of Church Brothers<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">We are currently in Yuma and Pearl Valley starting Monday March 26 we will have our romaine, green leaf, red leaf, butter lettuce and iceberg in Huron, and we’ll have a little bit of overlap with our Yuma production. And then we’ll transition from Huron to Salinas. We were going to move our plan to March 29th, took a look at the calendar and noticed that Easter was on April 8th, and we actually postponed our move until April 4th so we could service the high demand of the Easter pull. Weather in Yuma has been beautiful. We had frost about a week ago but other than that it’s been very nice weather. I don’t anticipate any quality issues there. We’re going to start out March 26th with very nice quality.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">
