Argentina: heatwave disrupts the harvest season

The week ending January 15, 2022, will be remembered by growers and processors in the San Juan region of Argentina as a week of madness, during which "scorching weather conditions suddenly led to accelerated ripening of the fruit, throwing harvesters and trucks onto the roads, and causing a stampede at the entrance to the factories."

 As explained by climatologist Germán Poblete, heatwaves usually last between three and five days. As of Monday, January 10, the episode of high temperatures had already lasted for about ten days, and forecasts predicted at least five more days – a completely abnormal situation. The previous heatwave, recorded in January 2010, did not exceed the "usual" duration. Another particular aspect of this season has been the increasingly destructive spring winds, which have had a negative impact on a number of crops. Several other crops have already been hit by this climatic phenomenon, which causes production losses and should be the subject of future studies. In the end, crop rhythms have been profoundly disrupted, to the extent that fields planted four weeks apart reached maturity at the same time, causing a bottleneck effect on harvest operations.

All the transport logistics set up by growers and factories, both in terms of empty trucks moving to the harvest fields and full trucks bringing tomatoes to factories, have been complicated by this exceptional peak in production, as well as the daily management of deliveries at the entrance of the processing plants.

Professionals working for the different transport and processing companies in the San Juan region also reported "an increase in the percentages of green fruit" and, despite the "good quality of the fruit, weight losses due to heat".

During the previous processing season (2020/21), the main climatic parameters (scarce rainfall in January, favorable temperatures) contributed (except for the spring winds) to achieving some very high yields at times (up to 160 metric tonnes per hectare), with an average yield of 110 mT/ha for the whole province. After the first deliveries of the 2022 season, local operators estimate that "last year's yields will not be reached, even if they are very high locally". The same sources confirm that the surface areas dedicated to processing tomatoes have increased in the region by about 500 hectares, that several new mechanical harvesters have been acquired and that the contract price of the raw material is around USD 90 /mT.

Source: diariodecuyo.com.ar