AU: Long summer puts pressure on lettuce crop

Farm owner, Murray McCosker, says the warm March has meant they have had deal with diseases like Pythium and Phytophthora. "Pythium is what they call an opportunistic organism in the water, it flows very quickly," he said. "It's created once your water temperature sort of gets above 28-30 degrees it does run rampant, we have been controlling it to the best of our ability but it has created some issues. Basically it just kills the lettuce off, it gets root rot and as that comes in the plant can't suck up the water and the nutrients so they tend to just discolour and then die."

But the long summer isn't the only factor working against the farm.

Mr McCosker says the amount of money they are getting for lettuce hasn't increased for five or six years. "Our input costs have gone up dramatically and that's across the board with power and water. But we've also got packaging costs, fertiliser costs, all that's gone up, transport, and unfortunately we're not getting any more for our produce."

"We've got to look at trying to streamline the operation if we can. Otherwise at the end of the day we're not really working for too much at all. It just comes down to, we've got to streamline it a bit more or we've got to look at it long term and say 'will we continue it?'."

More demand for mixed salad and herbs
But it's not all bad news, the lettuce farm isn't selling as much whole lettuce as they used to but the demand for herbs and cut leaf is increasing.

"We're probably doing double the amount of herbs now as to what we were doing say two to three years ago. Predominately coriander, basil, dill, continental parsley, curly parsley, we're doing a lot of those just for the supermarkets," he said. "The big movers at the moment are a thing called salanova, which is what they class as a one cut, so that when the consumer actually buys the whole head, in one cut the whole thing falls apart.

"They're also using that in the salad mixes, and that is one of the markets that is actually increasing.

Source: abc.net.au