Market and harvest report July 2023

Due to continuous rainfalls in Northern Europe earlier this spring, the crops have been sown, planted and drilled with delay, and will be exposed to summer heat and drought more extensively, which implies a risk of production loss. Nonetheless, the continuous northeast wind and high temperatures are now drying out the soils very fast. Farmers need to irrigate intensively to compensate for the lack of rainfall.

We had to cancel an important part of the spring spinach (up to 25%) because of the continuous rainfalls. The current outlook for the spring spinach doesn’t look good neither, due to climate conditions. After extremely tight crop transition, we start the season focused on following demand, as a replenishment of stocks was necessary.

We faced late drilling for green peas. Harvest for the early drilled peas has started around mid-June; however, we will face volatility in volumes coming from the fields. Peas reach an optimal maturity during only 48 hours, which is why our harvesting operations take place 24h a day, to bring the peas at the right quality to our factories, where they’re frozen within 90 to 180 minutes. There is also a big delay in other crops like carrots and cauliflowers. Southern Europe has been affected by substantial anomalies of soil moisture and river flow, due to an exceptionally dry and warm winter. In Spain and Portugal, there has been almost no rainfall since the start of the year. Moreover, there was a very exceptional heat wave in the end of April. Due to those conditions, irrigation was necessary for most of the plantings,

although farmers were afraid of not having enough water until the end of the season. However, it currently looks like water availability from the reservoirs will be sufficient. 

In the South, most of the crops have been planted, and the harvest of the peas has started with variable results. After two difficult seasons for broccoli, spring harvest yields are quite normal this year at the start of the season.

Following the extremely hot and dry weather in April, weather conditions were milder in May and early June – casting a more positive outlook for the summer crops.

Inputs like fertilizers and energy dropped to a more acceptable level for farmers, which is very positive.