TEXAS, USA — Grounded in the challenging, often-uncontrollable reality of someone who grows food, Texas citrus grower Dale Murden didn’t expect much after the state, his trees and his crop froze in February of 2021.
“I think after a freeze of that magnitude we're conditioned to expect the worst following the 1983 and the 1989 disasters,” Murden said. “This was an unusual event. We’ve actually been able to rebound maybe a little better than we had anticipated.”
Picking a grapefruit from one of his trees, Murden showed us what a good crop looks like.
“Good blush on the outside, nice pretty red juice on the inside, good and sweet,” he said. “That we have any fruit this year to market was a blessing. The trees are coming back pretty nicely. All that being said, we're still 70% off.”
During last year’s historic freeze, the Texas citrus industry suffered losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Murden, who’s also president of Texas Citrus Mutual, a nonprofit trade association that represents the state’s citrus growers, knows the big picture beyond his own groves.
“We're estimating, you know, 30% of a normal crop for the year,” Murden told KENS 5 in July. “Some growers are replanting new trees. Availability is a problem because most of the nurseries were already spoken for on their trees. So, some growers might have to wait up to three years before they can get new trees to plant.”
Murden called the storm the “Valentine's Day Massacre.”
“That we have any fruit this year to market was a blessing,” he told KENS 5.
“I've seen this everywhere, you'll have a tree like this one that just looks great, there's fruit all over it and then you'll have 10 trees with nothing like that,” he added. “That's why that crop is so light; it's just very unpredictable.”
Murden said that, after the freeze, some growers left the business altogether. Others, like him, stuck around, and continue growing food while worrying about the next storm.
“I started looking at some of the models and it's just insane,” Murden said. “The number of models and which one do you believe in? Okay, you take an average. What I've noticed is every day this week, the forecast has been lowered by at least a degree every day. And I'm like, ‘Well, all we can do at this point is wait and see. Hopefully, it's not another Valentine's Day Massacre.’”