Shoppers Are Paying More and Getting Lighter Lettuce

PHOENIX — Shoppers around the country are paying more for iceberg lettuce--and getting less for their money--because of flooding in Arizona and unusually warm weather earlier this year.

Swelled by runoff from heavy rain, the Gila River has swamped thousands of acres in the past two weeks in Yuma County, which provides about two-thirds of the nation’s winter iceberg lettuce.

Checks with supermarkets in Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Bergenfield, N.J., found shoppers were paying $1.49 per head, up from 99 cents a week ago. That price was up a dime from the week before.

Some shoppers are also finding heads of lettuce are lighter than normal because they were picked early--some from fields threatened with flooding and some by growers taking advantage of higher prices.

The wholesale price of a 24-head carton of lettuce in Arizona was $6 three weeks ago, rose to $24 two weeks ago and retreated by the middle of last week to $10-$12, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.

USDA spokesman Clarence Steinberg said the wholesale per-carton price is expected to stabilize at about $12 as lettuce begins to be harvested elsewhere. California’s San Joaquin Valley harvests in the spring.

Growers said the damage to fields and irrigation systems will be long-lasting.

“I expect it’s going to be a couple of years before some of this land is back in production,” said Vic Lanini, general manager of Bruce Church Inc.

Bob Nunes of Nunes Co., a lettuce shipper, said January was warmer and wetter than usual, hastening the maturation of lettuce in the region which contributed as well to temporary shortages and price hikes.

“We should have had cold weather,” he said. “We were harvesting some fields maybe one or two weeks ahead of time.”

That, in turn, meant fewer heads of lettuce were available later in February, when those fields normally would have been harvested, Nunes said.