AVOCADOS

ESCONDIDO — Justbefore World War I, working as a gardener in Bel-Air, Charles Henry was fascinated by the avocado trees he tended, trees that magically bore fruit mostof the year, from Thanksgiving through the Fourth of July. And so, in 1925, after a stint in the Navy and some time working the Huntington Beach oil fields, Henry took an extraordinary risk. He purchased 80 acres of citrus groves and vineyards in what is now Northern San Diego County, uprooted the lemon trees and grapevines, and planted the ocean-cooled hillside with avocado.

While most of California’s farmers were concentrating on traditional tree fruits (citrus, apples, peaches) and row crops such as lettuce and strawberries, Henry became one of the state’s first commercial producers of avocados, a fruit unknown to most North Americans at the time.

His Escondido gamble paid off. Within several years, the trees were fruitful. The avocado proved to be, as his nephew Philip Henry (now vice president of the family-owned company) says “ideally suited to Southern California, particularly San Diego County.”

Even today, though Florida, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas also have commercial avocado industries, the California fruit is considered superior. Its high oil content translates into a richer, more sophisticated flavor.

In those first years, Henry, who died in a tractor accident in 1953, would harvest, sort and pack the avocados by himself, then truck the fruit north to Los Angeles to personally sell his stock to knowledgeable restaurateurs and chefs at the best hotels of the era.

At the time, the avocado was considered wildly exotic--its nickname was the “alligator pear” because of its coarse skin and odd shape.

Henry had to persuade chefs, and others in Los Angeles’ small food world, about the fruit’s rich taste and versatility. But he didn’t have too much trouble. It was a time when people sought out unusual foods, and once chefs sampled an avocado, they were quick to add them to their menus.

Because they were so odd, avocados were fairly expensive throughout the 1920s and 1930s. They sold for several times the going rate for other, more abundant, tree fruit. The prices Henry was able to charge allowed him to earn a profit that could be reinvested in his fledgling company.

Over the years the fruit became a staple of the American table, and thanks to its increasing popularity, the Henry Avocado Packing Corp. became one of the state’s largest growers and packers of the fruit.

Then came the winter of 1987, the coldest California winter of the century. Severe freezes killed tree blossoms long before fruit could set. The winters of ‘88, ’89 and ’90 weren’t much better.

By 1991, the California fruit was selling for as much as $1.99 a piece in Los Angeles; prices were at least 50% higher on the East Coast. In Tokyo, avocado prices went up to $5 a piece. Shoppers accustomed to supermarket bargain prices--three avocados for $1--were incensed.

“You’d have to go back pretty far, maybe 20 years or so, to find three years as bad as the past three years (for the avocado industry),” says Robert Wedin, director of avocado operations for Calavo Growers of California, a Tustin-based cooperative and the state’s largest producer of avocados with about 2,200 grower members. “The shortage of fruit was caused by freezes, heat waves and some additional problems with the drought. All of those, to some degree, are behind us.”

Initially, during the 1989-1990 season, the avocado shortage meant big profits for growers. Then there was a buyers’ backlash. “The high prices began to wear thin with the restaurant industry, supermarkets and the consumer,” Wedin says. “The demand for avocados began to drop and growers’ financial return began to worsen.”

Now, at the peak of the 1992 California avocado season, things are returning to some sense of normalcy.

Wedin says that a typical California growing season, which extends from December through August, will produce about 325 to 350 million pounds of avocados. Virtually the entire crop, about 85%, consist of the Haas variety, or the fruit whose skin blackens as it ripens. Record harvests, such as in 1986-1987, totaled 550 million pounds, a far cry from the past few years when annual production dropped as low as 200 million pounds. Estimates for the 1991-1992 season are for about 325 million pounds, he says.

Despite the rosier outlook, some growers are complaining, in a somewhat traditional refrain, that the supermarket chains have not passed the lower prices on to shoppers.

Steve Taft, president of Eco-Farm Corp. in Temecula, says that retail avocado prices are three times higher than what the chains are currently paying for the fruit. (Standard retail prices for produce should be about 50% above wholesale, he says.)

Philip Henry says that he hopes consumers alienated by high avocado prices of past years will become reacquainted with the fruit during the peak production months of April, May, June and July.

But there may be more trouble on the horizon for the California avocado industry: Mexico’s persistent request to export avocados to this country. There is no precise information available, but estimates place Mexico’s annual avocado harvest at between 1 billion and 2 billion pounds. At the moment, Mexican avocados are not allowed into the United States because of seed weevil infestation. But the prospect of Mexican avocado shipments will not fade, especially with the Bush Administration’s proposed free trade agreement between Mexico and the United States.

“The Mexican government has been pressuring (Washington). They would like the U.S. Department of Agriculture (which placed the quarantine on Mexican avocados) and the Congress to believe that their fruit is not infested. We’re concerned,” says Henry.

Taft, of Eco-Farm, says that if Mexico is allowed to ship its avocados into the United States then that wave of imported fruit would “ruin” California’s $200 million-a-year avocado industry by offering somewhat similar quality fruit at considerably cheaper prices.

In the meantime, the Californians are doing all they can to promote and market avocados now that the fruit is once again reasonably priced. One of the industry’s latest technological advances is to treat the fruit with ethylene gas. The conditioning hastens the ripening, allowing grocers to sell avocados that can be consumed almost immediately. (Ethylene gas is a natural compound that avocados emit as they ripen; for this reason the industry recommends that unripe avocados be placed in a paper bag at room temperature to hasten ripening.)

And unless the weather has a few surprises still in store, the groves filled with subtle, green blossoms should turn into a plentiful supply of avocados over the next year. “This year we had a beautiful winter with no wind and no freeze,” says Taft. “The strong bloom on the trees now indicates that there’ll be a big crop again in 1993.”