Some navels affected by South Africa drought.
Some anticipate volume to be down at least 20% as a result of splitting and drop, attributed to the extended dry weather, and others predict the drought will have a minimal effect on their citrus program, if any at all.
Seven Seas is part of Springfield, Ill.-based Tom Lange Co.
“Arrivals of navels in August will be affected,” Vinson said, “and we will be out of South African navels in September.” Other companies did not foresee a particularly significant effect of the drought and associated issues on their crops.
Chuck Yow, director of U.S. sales and business development for Capesan North America, said the company expects about a 10% decline from last year’s shipment volume.
That could change, he said, but for now Capespan doesn’t view the extended dry weather as devastating for its South Africa navel crop.
“We’re by no means in a panic situation,” Yow said, noting that the Western Cape hasn’t been nearly as hard-hit by the drought as the Eastern Cape.
Andreas Economou, CEO for Philadelphia-based Tastyfrutti International, said his company also expects a strong market in the U.S. given the early finish by California.
Tastyfrutti doesn’t expect any decrease in volume due to the drought.
None of the companies expect the drought to affect the beginning of shipments, several of which are scheduled to kick off in mid- to late June.

End of drought could mean the beginning of a busy wildfire season in Southern California.
“Whatever brush didn’t burn in last year’s fire season is still there but it is dead because of the five-year drought,” said Inspector Gustavo Medina of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
On Monday, the county, as well as Cal Fire and the fire departments from San Bernardino, Orange, Riverside and Imperial counties announced the start of fire season.
To be ready, Los Angeles County Fire has eight helicopters standing by.
In September, the department will have two super scooper planes available through the end of fire season.
Fire departments are concerned that homeowners have become complacent since the drought ended.
“Yeah, we are already having brush fires.
Wildfires occur in the Santa Monica, San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains and in the surrounding foothills, he said.
Advertisement A few common spots Los Angeles County Fire is watching are the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the Malibu hills and canyons, the Santa Clarita area and the corridor of the 5 Freeway.
Sometimes clearing an area to the dirt will allow more invasive grasses to grow, which are more flammable.

Dry, drought-like conditions continued to spread across the Red River Valley after what proved to be a dry May, the Texas Water Development Board said Monday in its weekly water report.
In its latest update, the TWDB said only 4 percent of the state is currently in a drought, but “abnormally dry” conditions continue to spread across the state.
Early in May, Mace said the state was poised to end the month with no drought conditions statewide.
This week’s report was generated using data collected last week.
Locally, the report saw continued drought and drought-like conditions in Texoma.
“Moderate drought” conditions persisted in the southeast and eastern portions of the county.
While Grayson County remained drought free in the latest report, the majority of the county, save portions along the Red River, was considered “abnormally dry.” In the first week of May, the region has seen about 0.52 inches of rain with about five inches expected for the month, National Weather Service Meteorologist Matt Bishop said Tuesday.
The next chance of rain happening is Friday morning when a system moves in from the panhandle.
“If those storms reach far enough east, you might have a slight chance for rain,” he said, calling for a 20 percent chance of precipitation.
Greater chances of rain will fall early next week, hitting a peak on Tuesday, he said.

The Relentless March of Drought – That ‘Horseman of the Apocalypse’.
To mitigate these impacts, drought preparedness that responds to human needs, while preserving environmental quality and ecosystems, requires involvement of all stakeholders including water users and water providers to achieve solutions for drought, explains UNCCD.
“Drought, a complex and slowly encroaching natural hazard with significant and pervasive socio-economic and environmental impacts, is known to cause more deaths and displace more people than any other natural disaster.” Drought, Water Scarcity and Refugees On this, Monique Barbut, UNCCD Executive Secretary, reminds that the world’s drought-prone and water scarce regions are often the main sources of refugees.
“Converging factors like political tension, weak institutions, economic marginalisation, lack of social safety nets or group rivalries create the conditions that make people unable to cope.
According to Convention, the geo-political and security challenges the world faces are complex, but a better implementing good land management practices can simultaneously help populations adapt to climate change and build resilience to drought; reduce the risk of forced migration and conflict over dwindling natural resources and secure sustainable agricultural and energy production.
“Land truly is the glue that holds our societies together.
Reversing the effects of land degradation and desertification through sustainable land management (SLM) is not only achievable; it is the logical, cost-effective next step for national and international development agendas…” UNCCD informs that 12 million hectares of productive land become barren every year due to desertification and drought alone, which is a lost opportunity to produce 20 million tons of grain.
“We cannot afford to keep degrading land when we are expected to increase food production by 70 per cent by 2050 to feed the entire world population.” “Sustainable intensification of food production, with fewer inputs, that avoids further deforestation and cropland expansion into vulnerable areas should be a priority for action for policy makers, investors and smallholder farmers.” Meantime, the Convention’s secretariat reports that the increase in droughts and flash floods that are stronger, more frequent and widespread is destroying the land – the Earth’s main fresh water store.
Over 1 billion people today have no access to water, and demand will increase by 30 per cent by 2030.” National Security, Migration With up to 40 per cent of all intrastate conflicts in the past 60 years are linked to the control and allocation of natural resources, the exposure of more and more poor people to water scarcity and hunger opens the door to the failure of fragile states and regional conflicts, according to UNCCD.
Losing productive land is driving people to make risky life choices, it adds and explains that in rural areas where people depend on scarce productive land resources, land degradation is a driver of forced migration.

But the biggest milestone for urban areas was the state’s unprecedented order to cut water use by an average of 25 percent.
And the urban economy still grew faster than the national average.
It didn’t reflect how well prepared most urban suppliers were, or their willingness to further reduce water use when needed.
They point to a strategy to better manage water, and not just during droughts.
Second, becoming resilient to drought requires developing water reserves and managing short-term demands.
Cities invested vast sums on supply and storage since the last major drought, but the state mandate focused exclusively on demand, essentially ignoring local supplies.
Managers said that uncertainty about future state policy could discourage such investments, funded mostly by local ratepayers.
To improve response to future droughts, a “trust but verify” policy can be more effective than the “better safe than sorry” approach of the state conservation mandate.
A good model is the “stress test” the state adopted toward the end of the drought, which allowed local utilities to drop conservation mandates if they could demonstrate they had three years of drought-resilient supplies.
The state should also make permanent its requirement that suppliers report their water use each month.

Cape Town storm: Eight killed as drought ends.
Eight people have been killed when a storm lashed the South African city of Cape Town following months of drought.
Thousands of people have been left homeless.
The storm comes two weeks after the region declared a drought disaster.
BBC weather forecaster Philip Avery warns that Wednesday could bring in excess of 50mm of rain to some western areas of South Africa, accompanied by winds of 60-90km/h.
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Thursday should see conditions easing but a passing cold front will introduce much cooler weather in all areas.
He also warns that the strong winds could lead to wildfires because the countryside is so dry.
In May, the Western Cape province declared a drought disaster after two reservoirs had completely dried up.
It was said to have been the region’s worst drought in more than a century.

Drought Numbers: Big Improvement from 2016.
Just over two inches in April and less than that in May wasn’t good enough.
That’s where things went downhill.
We had a slow recovery in June and July, but then it was too late.
Check out the difference in rain totals from this year to last for April and May.
Now we are still at a deficit in the Shoals and Huntsville on the 2017 totals.
Only a small sliver of west Alabama has “dry” conditions.
That’s a big improvement from just a couple of months ago when most of the Tennessee Valley was under a “severe” drought.
We’ll monitor the situation in the coming months, but as for now, it looks good!
*Courtesy: U.S. Drought Monitor

Weekend heat pushing 100 Sunday?.
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport recorded nearly 5 inches of rainfall in May.
Light-switch drought Most of May’s rainfall fell in the first 20 days of the month.
Here’s a look at rainfall for the past 14 days.
Notice most of southern Minnesota has recorded less than .25 inches of rainfall in the past 14 days.
The average rainfall this time of year is about 1 inch per week.
Little or no rainfall for two to three weeks.
Weekly evaporation rates over 1 inch from soils.
The combination of these weather conditions is rapidly drying soils that were waterlogged just two weeks ago.
With spotty rains expected this week, many areas may go without significant rainfall for another week.

When a soil dries out, this has a negative impact on the activity of soil bacteria.
Using an innovative combination of state-of-the-art analysis and imaging techniques, researchers at UFZ have now discovered that fungi increase the activity of bacteria in dry and nutrient-poor habitats by supplying them with water and nutrients.
Once found, water and nutrients are absorbed and transported through the hyphae, allowing them to be supplied to parts of the fungal network in dry or nutrient-poor areas of the soil.
As part of their investigations, the researchers closely examined the transport of water, substrates and nutrients through the microscopically small hyphae of fungi.
The fungal hyphae had to pass through a dry, nutrient-free zone in order to grow through into a new area containing the culture medium.
In the experiment, these conditions were indeed improved by the growth of the fungi: "As the fungal hyphae grew through the dry zone, the bacterial spores germinated and we noticed clear microbial activity," says UFZ environmental microbiologist Dr. Lukas Y. Wick.
This study has given the UFZ researchers another important insight into fungi and their important function in soils.
This could be important specifically with regard to the impacts of climate change, if the ratio of dry to moist areas of soil dramatically increases," says Kästner.
"We want to carry out soil experiments under different environmental conditions and find out what influence fungal growth has on the breakdown of pollutants," says Wick.
Mycelium-mediated transfer of water and nutrients stimulates bacterial activity in dry and oligotrophic environments.

At the May meeting of the Delta Stewardship Council, councilmembers once again took up the issue of the Delta Plan amendment regarding conveyance, storage, and operations.
The draft Delta Plan conveyance, storage, and operations amendment includes recommendations for Delta water management system operations and supporting infrastructure improvements that are intended together and in combination with existing Delta Plan policies and recommendations, to further the coequal goals.
There are three things that move things around in the system: tides, rivers, and exports.
“Almost every one of these other channels is conveying river water or exports or whatever so it’s a pass through system, it’s a conveyance system essentially,” he said.
So for example, we could restore tidal wetlands in Suisun Marsh and improve survival in the north Delta without a single salmon going into Suisun Marsh.” “So to conclude, it’s not just rivers and exports that are moving things around the system, it’s not just rivers and exports that are affecting organisms in the Delta, it’s these three things here that work together that we can work with to actually help achieve the coequal goals.”
“We need to know what ecosystem restoration looks like in order to know what kind of conveyance is acceptable and desirable and what kind of additional storage is acceptable and desirable.” Regarding ecosystem function, the best available science reveals that the key to any restoration of ecosystem function in the Delta will require an improvement in timing and the volume of water flowing into, through, and out of the Delta, Dr. Rosenfield said.
“There are plenty of uncertainties out there that are valid things to consider, but the draft plan that I’m reading seems to be promoting, we need new conveyance of a certain type to achieve our goals when I haven’t seen what the goals actually mean in order to evaluate what kind of conveyance you’ll need or what kind of storage you’ll need.” “In closing, describing the new conveyance and storage plans in the context of how they serve the dual goals is really critical, because simply put, the need for alternative conveyance, storage, and operation depends entirely on how much water will be withdrawn from the Delta in the future,” Dr. Rosenfield concluded.
There’s no scientific debate about that.” “The mechanism – there’s a lot of discussion,” Dr. Rosenfield continued.
So I’m not trying to duck your question … “ “What I’m wondering is whether there are any circumstances where I change in point of diversion or an isolated facility in combination with any other set of solutions that you’ve worked on with BDCP and elsewhere would make sense?,” asked Councilmember Johnston.
“The Bay Institute and myself as professional are willing to look into all potential solutions to improve the status quo, including a different point of diversion, different storage south of Delta, different conveyance, and different operations,” said Dr. Rosenfield.