YAKIMA — After a late start to the season, last week’s heat woke the Yakima Valley’s asparagus crop out of its slumber. Now, growers are heralding in the 2023 harvest season as they pick, cut, wash, pack and ship the vegetables across across the country.
A relatively cool spring kept the valley’s asparagus crops in the ground for nearly three weeks longer than usual. Though this had growers worried, temperatures in the 70s and 80s in the past week broke the season’s cold snap and shifted the harvest into full gear.
Alan Schrieber, executive director of the Washington Asparagus Commission, said he’s looking forward to a strong harvest this year. If the warm temperatures stick around, asparagus will continue growing, leaving plenty of work for growers and produce for consumers.
“One year ago we had the latest start to the season we’ve seen,” Schrieber said. “This year we had almost as late of a start because the cold weather delayed the harvest. Then it got really warm really fast and so much asparagus came out. It was incredible and it looks like it’s really high quality. The asparagus just exploded from the ground.”
While fluctuations in weather and temperature could change the estimate, Schrieber said the Washington Asparagus Commission is expecting growers across the state to harvest around 18 million pounds of the vegetable in 2023.
“That’s up from 15 million last year,” Schrieber said. “That would be a good number to hit.”
At Imperial’s Garden in Wapato, Manuel Imperial was taking advantage of the warm weather and explosive growth before temperatures cool back down.
“We’ll have some cold spill next week and that’ll slow down the production,” Imperial said. “These first 10 days have put out a lot of product compared to last year.”
Imperial said he expects this year’s yield will be much better than last year’s.
Last year, each of the grower’s 260 acres dedicated to farming asparagus yielded about 5,000 pounds for a total yield of about 1.3 million pounds. He expects this year’s yield to be about 20% larger.
Though he expects this year’s harvest to be successful, Imperial said he worries about the state of the industry as a whole. At its peak in the early ‘90s, Washington produced over 100 million pounds of asparagus per year.
“The one thing about asparagus growers in Washington and in the valley is that we’re almost a dying breed,” Imperial said. “We’ve got about a good 20 or so growers farming about 3,000 to 3,500 acres. Twenty-five years ago it used to be about 30,000 acres.”
Imperial said asparagus coming in from Mexico and Peru costs much less to grow and process. He said higher labor and material costs in the U.S. keep states like Washington from being able to compete.
“Overtime is OK, raising the minimum wage is OK,” Imperial said. “The problem that a lot of people don’t get is that we can’t make the money back from the produce we grow when the market dictates what we sell. With Mexican and Peruvian asparagus being so cheap, we can’t compete.”
On a busy morning near the start of the season, Imperial said as many as 300 workers split between the fields and packing lines will take part in the harvesting process.
Lon Inaba, general manager of Yakama Nation Farms, has spent most of his life working with fresh produce. He said farmworkers and Yakama Nation Farms started harvesting in the last week of May.
He said the harvest started off slow, with workers mostly just cleaning and prepping the crop. Now that the heat is here, he said the harvest is now in full swing. He expects the harvest season to end in the last weeks of June.
Inaba said he’s worried about temperatures staying too warm for too long early in the season. While heat is good for growth, he said, too much heat can cause asparagus heads to start flowering, leading to thinner asparagus spears.
For asparagus to grow, the soil temperature has to stay above 50 degrees.
“It all just depends on how hot it gets,” Inaba said. “If we start getting 90 degrees days and what happens is it (asparagus) grows too fast and the head just blows out and it starts to flower. Cool mornings, cool days, that keep the head tight. That’s where your quality is at.”
If it gets too hot, Inaba said Yakama Nation Farm may have to start using sprinklers to keep the asparagus cool. If the temperature stays high, but below 90, two harvests per day may do the trick in keeping asparagus from flowering.
“If you cool the soil, it pretty much prevents growth,” Inaba said. “If we have some 80-degree days, we might have to cut twice, once in the morning and once in the evening. If it gets too hot, well that’s when you blow the head and the quality goes to heck and the harvest is done.”
High temperatures, which reached 86 in Yakima on Wednesday, are forecast to cool off to the 60s over the next several days, according to the weather service.
Inaba said county residents should take advantage of the fresh asparagus as it starts hitting store and market shelves.
“Eat it when it’s fresh, eat local and eat it in season. That’s always going to be best.”
Santiago Ochoa’s reporting for the Yakima Herald-Republic is possible with support from Report for America and community members through the Yakima Valley Community Fund. For information on republishing, email news@yakimaherald.com.
