The national shipping outlook for sweet potatoes is looking good for the up coming season. Meanwhile, here’s a look at the soaring shipments of a newer apple variety.
Mississippi’s sweet potato crop has experienced a rise from 23,200 acres in 2015 to about 25,500 acres this year. Diggings are just getting underway.
In Louisiana, most of the damaging floods apparently occurred south of the sweet potato fields in the state. In North Carolina (with more than 80,000 acres of production), sweet potatoes is easily the nation’s major player and has a much bigger role than Louisiana, which has less than 9,000 acres.
more than two feet of rain have fallen. By Aug. 23, after it finally stops raining, it will be four or five days before crews can even get into fields, Vead said.
North Carolina ships about 53 percent of the nation’s sweet potatoes because the climate in North Carolina is ideal for growing product. The USDA’s report in March 2016, intended plantings of sweet potatoes nationally are up almost 8 percent (169,400 acres for 2016 crop compared to 156,900 for 2015 crop) with the largest increase coming from North Carolina with almost a 21 percent increase (105,000 for 2016, 87,000 for 2015).
North Carolina’s harvesting started in mid August runs through early November. The new crop will start being shipping around late September to early October.
Honeycrisp Apples
The 2015 season Washington State saw fresh market Honeycrisp shipments at about 8.5 million cartons. The 2015 season was aided by controlled-atmosphere storages allowing Honeycrisp apples to be shipped into late July. This is due to the technology of storing the variety, which has seen marked improvement in the past few years. Retail pricing of Honeycrisp ranged from $2.99 to $3.99 per pound for most of the 2015-16 season, meaning that supermarkets were making $160 gross for product on product that cost about $80 per carton.