When hurricanes make landfall, it not only impacts the current year’s crop but sometimes future harvests as well.

For example, SlimCado avocado trees will get stressed by a hurricane. Even a tree that didn’t lose a branch may still suffer, growing less fruit the next season and more. How much longer depends on the storm’s severity, it took about 20 years for harvests to get back to normal after Hurricane Andrew.  

Then there’s the larger problem of these shallow-rooted trees blowing over. We can set them back up. But again, harvests will be impacted possibly for years.

The storms are too numerous to mention with too little that can be done to limit the damage. So we geographically diversify. That means growing our papayas in both Guatemala and Costa Rica, our SlimCados in both Southern Florida and the Dominican Republic. With 2 locations for harvests, we’ve lessened our chances of both being hit in the same year. We’ll pick less, but we’ll still have Caribbean Red papayas, SlimCado avocados and more to pick.

Click to read what we did to prepare for category 5 hurricane Dean that hit our papaya fields in Belize in 2007.

Even in southern Florida, the thermometer can dip below freezing.

When it does, it puts our avocado trees, starfruit bushes, passionfruit vines, and more in jeopardy.  For most of what we grow, a cold front can kill plants that take years to grow back to bear fruit again.

During frigid weather, we’ve found that sprinkling our trees and plants with a thin layer of water will freeze, but will provide insulation from lower temperatures.

So you’ll see sprinklers in our fields, but those aren’t for watering but for extreme cold weather. We let our microjets and drip tapes do the watering, doing it in a much more effective and efficient way.