After Freeze, Counting Losses to Orange Crop

Jim Powell is grim as he looks over the acres of destroyed oranges around him, the leaves of the trees curled and burned by frost.

"There's no question it's a disaster," he says. "It's probably as bad a disaster as any that's happened to this area."

Mr. Powell oversees almost 600 acres of orange trees in Madera County, in the San Joaquin Valley in Central California, where oranges flourish in the normally moderate weather. But beginning the weekend before Christmas, temperatures dropped to the low 20's and high teens and stayed there formore than a week.

When the freeze first hit, farmers frantically tried to save their crops. But as the cold held on, they slowly gave up on the fruit and began to tally their losses. Losses in the Millions

"A lot of the people pulled the plug, but I told my growers to hold on," Mr. Powell said. In an effort to keep his crop warm, he used wind machines longer than most farm managers, despite the cost. Each machine, covering 10 acres, costs up to $30 an hour to operate.

State agriculture officials estimatethat the freeze destroyed 90 percent of the navel orange crop in the valley. Loss estimates run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

On a recent tour of his farm, Mr. Powell reached out to a tree, limbs heavy with ruined fruit. He cut into an orange, pointing with his knife at the watery interior.

"See there," he said, "the water has soaked all the sections that divide the segments. All the cells have burst."

He threw it to the ground and grabbed another, cutting into it quickly. Same thing. "Some people are saying it's so blasted we won't get anything," he said. "We just don't knowyet."

As for next year's crop, Mr. Powell and others will not know the extent of the damage the frigid weather caused until spring, when the buds should emerge.

"They look all right to me now, but who knows if they really are," he said.

For now, farmers are trying to protect their trees from another freeze, which could cause further harm to the already injured tree tissues. Extensive tree damage could hurt the farmers for five years, which is how long it takes for trees to fully produce. Splotches of Rust

To a visitor driving past acres of groves, the damage is evident. The orange trees look as though they were frosted. The leaves, usually a darkwaxy green, are now curled inward, exposing a lightly colored underside.

Oranges have splotches of dark orange or rust, where the ice froze and then burst the rind's cells. Mr. Powell said the dark areas of the oranges will probably rot.

"You just tighten your belt and go on," Mr. Powell said. "We deal with these kinds of things all the time."

Industries that depend on oranges may suffer as much or more than growers. More than 15,000 people have been dismissed from their jobs at the 70 packing houses in the valley; an undetermined number of pickers and truckers are also out of work.

"I walked into a packing house the other day, and it was like I walked into a wake," Mr. Powell said. "All the girlsin the office were crying. They had just got their pink slips that day."

State agriculture officials are moving quickly to have the hardest-hit counties declared a Federal disaster area so that emergency low-interest loans will become available.

Mr. Powell remains philosophical at the wrath of nature.

"We had a nice crop," he said, looking at the sad-looking trees around him. "We had the prospects of a good year. But it's like what you say when people ask how you're doing: 'One night in December can change your whole outlook on life.' "