Oxnard: It’s hard to believe that next weekend is Memorial Day and we are still harvesting beautiful fruit here in Oxnard. Thanks to your feedback on great quality and flavor, we are still in fresh production here. Our fruit looks and tastes great this week with really good sizing thanks to the weather finally giving us a little love. We are staying on top of our harvest rotation schedule to ensure continued best quality as long as we can stay in fresh here and our QC teams are monitoring every ranch each day. While some areas of town are shifting their ranches into freezer, we are assessing our fields daily to ensure quality is there for the fresh market and will only shift when it is not. The weather forecast shows continued mild weather conditions ahead with daytime highs in the high 60’s-low 70’s with mild evening temps in the 50’s. We will stay in this as long as we can since the fruit and plants are still giving us a nice pack.
Santa Maria: Our volume in Santa Maria is picking up each week as we have been reporting. However, we are still relying on our Oxnard volume to fill out our weekly sales commitments. We expect our numbers here to increase each week with a peak forecasted by mid-June. Weather conditions here are optimum and everything is lining up to provide us with a great summer program. We spent the day walking the fields yesterday and enjoyed some delicious fruit right off the plants. As you can see from these photos, everything looks great here on the west side of town!
The California Strawberry Commission updated crop forecast still shows we are well behind previous years total volume to date, but weekly volume is finally looking somewhat normal. Surprisingly, Oxnard cumulative numbers have almost caught up to 2022 thanks to the mild Spring weather and quality from this region.
