Generational growers in the Coachella Valley tell News Channel 3 this week’s extreme heat is pushing crops into conditions they have never seen this early in the season
PALM DESERT, Calif (KESQ) It's something you'll often ask your neighbor or the person sitting next to you in the car as you drive down highway 111 - what exactly is growing in those fields? And now, is turning into something much more serious for Coachella Valley agriculture this week: a real-time test under record-shattering heat that longtime farmers say they have never seen this early in their lifetime.
Across the West, March temperatures have run 20 to 30 degrees above normal in some places during what forecasters have described as one of the most significant March heat waves in recorded history.
In the Coachella Valley, the numbers have been staggering. Palm Springs reached 108 degrees on March 20 during a stretch of record March heat that has repeatedly rewritten the books. By Sunday, March 22, the National Weather Service reported new daily records of 101 in Palm Springs, 104 in Indio, and 103 in Thermal.
That is the backdrop for what farmers are now trying to understand in the fields.
George Tudor, a Coachella Valley grape grower, and President and CEO of Tudor Ranch Inc., called the heat wave “unexpected” and said it is “keeping us farmers on our toes, that’s for sure.”
For grapes, some of the concern is immediate.
Tudor said this kind of heat can create “a real situation and a real danger” during bloom, when bunches can lose too many berries and fail to develop the full, healthy shape growers and shoppers want.
He said the heat can act like someone putting “their foot on the gas pedal,” accelerating development so quickly that growers are left trying to manage a process they cannot fully slow down.
But the bigger concern is the one farmers cannot yet measure.
“I don’t know,” Tudor said when asked what this stretch of heat could ultimately mean for this year’s crop. “We’ve never had this kind of weather for an extent, you know, this time of year.”
He said he has “definitely” had concerns about crop quality, explaining that when heat units pile up too quickly, grapes can mature faster than the berries size up. The result, he said, can be fruit that still tastes good but comes in smaller than expected, cutting into tonnage and pack-out.
And when asked how this year compares with others, Tudor was blunt: “We’ve never had a year like this weather-wise.”
So the question now is bigger than what is growing in those fields.
It is whether this record-shattering Western heat wave is changing the season before it has fully begun and what that could mean for crops, harvest timing, and the farmers trying to stay ahead of something they say they have never seen arrive this way before.
News Channel 3’s Garrett Hottle has been speaking with farmers, industry experts, and touring farms and fields with the Riverside County Farm Bureu and Boy & Girls Club of Coachella Valley. Watch his full report tonight on a record-shattering heat wave now turning into a desert mystery.
