It may be early days for Spanish salads, but reports suggest the industry is, for the most part, gearing up for a better season than 2005.
Last year proved as difficult as the much lamented 2004 deal: warm weather and oversupply, low light levels and related shortages, and then severe cold snaps during January and February all contributed to a tough trading period.
But while planting began amid optimism this year, mainland Spain is once again experiencing climatic troubles - although of a different vein. What is thought to be the worst drought in more than a decade is causing a serious shortage of water in some areas, and according to an Independent report, taps in Murcia and Alicante could stop running in the coming weeks, with reservoirs running on just 10 per cent of normal supplies.
Inevitably, this will cause problems for growers without the facilities to regularly irrigate crops. While the country waits to see if the rains due in October are enough to rebalance the situation, many will be set back by the prolonged dry spell.
Hernan Cortes of Cortes Ltd, a salad producer which in Spain specialises in tomatoes grown just outside Almería, says that with water such an issue for the country, growers who are not organised with regular access to wells can easily get caught out. “Drought affects lots of crops - they all need water,” he says. “There are some growers who group together and channel water from certain areas, but other growers do not necessarily have a supply of water and these are the people that will probably not risk planting.”
Peter Davis md of importer/exporter Davis (Louth) Ltd agrees. “We can irrigate but there are people that can’t, and their produce is just not growing” he says. “But we will see higher prices this year than last.”
However, for those unaffected by the drought, the mood is relatively buoyant. Last year, many growers suffered intermittently from an oversupplied market on many lines, which brought prices down. But Cortes thinks growers have learned their lesson: “There was quite a big production of tomatoes last year so the prices were poor. I think that will mean that there is less planted this year. People are planting more of other products like cucumbers and peppers, and tomatoes will revert to normal volumes,” he says.
Experts hope this change of tack will also resonate to Spain’s competitors, with growers in the Canary Islands and Morocco either diversifying into new products, or following increased demand for more niche tomato varieties. However, if growers want to really boost prices, there needs to be greater emphasis on quality, Cortes says. “Quality is the main factor in pricing; there is a huge variation in pricing of average and of good-quality product. So quality is important in this business; quality is the factor that’s needed if you want to do business in the future.”
This approach is also likely to be one applied by the whole sector. “Fewer volumes of better quality [produce] will be a bonus to the whole trade,” says Steve Cornwell of SpaniaFresh Produce, which supplies a variety of tomatoes, cucumbers and different capsicums to the UK market. “Swamping the market only drives prices down for the customer to be more aggressive. I think the volumes will be more regulated because the spread of crops will be better, and more capsicums are being grown for a better return per square metre.”
But with the weather seemingly becoming less typical and more volatile by the year, producing top quality fruit and vegetables is not always an easy task.
Abbey View Produce supplies tomatoes and cucumbers from the Canary Islands, as well as tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers from mainland Spain, and is expecting to receive tomatoes and peppers around the end of October and start of November. The company’s marketing manager Luke Hibberd, is philosophical about the problems the weather can cause: “There is always a possibility of quality issues as with growing any crop,” he says “This is mainly down to weather issues - cold to hot, not enough sun, too much sun etc.”
And as the majority of crops in Spain are unheated, the weather remains a pivotal contributor to the season’s overall success, he says: “The major issue for mainland Spain is the low temperatures that can set in for January and February. When the temperature drops too low, the pepper and tomato crops can have bad settings, producing less fruit, and all crops slow the turn-around time of the fruit setting to the fruit picking. This again reduces the quantity available.”
Davis says his company experienced a poor season last year, with many crops in France in particular, severely affected. As a result, Davis Louth is hedging its bets, and shifting planting to become more equally spread across France and Spain. Working with a company based in Valencia, it will also plant 15-20 per cent more as a safeguard against climatic problems, he says. “We will be doing more with Spain and less with France because of the problems with the weather in January. Temperatures of -10ºc meant we let people down left right and centre. So this year we decided we would spread our wings.”
He reveals that the company has even begun to receive some supplies of speciality lettuce from Spain already to meet a severe shortage in supply to the UK. “France is finishing four weeks early and we are so short that we are starting with product from Spain already, although there will be no decent weight to product as it’s too early in the season. Normally lettuce starts coming from the second and third week of October,” he says.
In an attempt to second-guess the weather, he also commissioned a forecast report for the Spanish season, which produced a less-than-positive synopsis. “The south of Spain will have wetter, windier and colder weather [overall], but one’s thing’s for sure: we cannot have a January like last year,” Davis says.
According to Cornwell, coping with the different weather patterns and changes in temperature later in the season will be the sector’s biggest challenges this year. One way growers are attempting to control the worst effects is by investing in better technology. Hibberd predicts more growers to erect ‘twin-skinned’ plastic to help deal with the colder temperatures.
Some companies have built heated glasshouses to safeguard against cold snaps like the ones experienced last year - a great asset but a large investment on low returns, says Cornwell. For these people rising energy prices are an added factor for consideration, coupled with the increasing cost of transporting produce. Cortes, whose company uses climate-controlled strucures, says: “Whether it’s for heating or distribution everything goes up. The cost of cartons is going up this year. For the vast majority in the tomato and iceberg business, [these costs] are not sustainable on a year-on-year basis.”
The rising cost of production against some tough prices is having an effect on the amount of growers operating. Many older producers in Spain are giving up the business early and retiring. A lot of production land for salads is based in coastal areas, such as Almeria, and with tourism in Spain still big business, prices are soaring. The temptation to take the money for their land and run is too great for more struggling.
And while rising energy prices in the UK could see British growers refrain from planting early cucumbers altogether, Cornwell says it is unlikely Spain can benefit from this supply window. “Next spring the English season will be totally different and growers will go later and spread their risk because of high energy prices and the fact that supermarkets will no longer pay premiums for spring crops. No support is given to the UK if something is cheaper somewhere else,” he says. Hibberd agrees: “Mainland Spain will find it hard to capitalise on this for two reasons. The first is the lack of heated greenhouses coupled with the cold weather at that time of year. The second is that during February, many Spanish growers pull out to plant their spring melon crop.”
And despite the rising prices of fuel, Cortes says his company is expanding into direct distribution so it can import produce and deliver directly to its customers. “We’ve got enough supplies of tomatoes to go to most customers directly,” he says. “It’s hard work logistically, but we are trying to save on costs of internal distribution. We trialled it last season, but are extending it to do a lot more this year.”
Another new focus for the company is speciality tomatoes, complementing its investment in greenhouses and under cover heating, and it is increasing production areas of these both within Spain and the Canary Islands. “Using the structures we’ve got, we can produce really high-quality round tomatoes, which there is a shortage of, but with heating, we can also produce speciality tomatoes, and this is an area we are looking to develop,” he says. “We have reasonable controls in place to protect against the elements, so I think we maintain a standard, which is one of our big pluses.”
With planting starting three weeks ago, he says the company’s crops look fantastic and he expects the season to be reasonably good, with nothing abnormal going on affecting its production at the moment. “You can only have high hopes if you’ve got quality and we as a company are very selective. I do not have high hopes for growers who are not producing high-quality yields because their structures are not good enough or they’ve not invested in their crops. People who cut corners - these people I do not have high hopes for.”
