Guacamole and avocado toast are about to cost you a lot more green. Between an intense heat wave, summer drought and heavy winter rains, California, the nation’s leading avocado producer, has suffered a significant shortfall of fruits this year. Forecasts expect production to plunge as much as 46% to 215 million pounds, down from 401 million pounds in 2016. “We lost fruit that would have have sized up to be this year’s crop,” Jan DeLyser, vice president of marketing for the California Avocado Commission, a trade group for avocado growers, told the Los Angeles Times. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average cost of an avocado jumped to $1.25 last week — up from $1.14 last year at the same time and just 94 cents at the start of summer 2016. Mexico, the leading international avocado supplier to the U.S., suffered similar weather this year and is able to send fewer boxes across the border, adding…
A surprising number of adults think brown cows make chocolate milk
Seven percent of all adults in America believe that brown cows produce chocolate milk, according to an online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy. That’s about 16.4 million misinformed folks who don’t know that chocolate milk is made of milk, cocoa and sugar. It’s jaw dropping for most of us, but for decades, educators and observers of all things agriculture have been telling us that we’re basically illiterate when it comes to what’s on our kitchen table. Many people don’t stop to consider where their food is grown or how it gets to the store — or, like chocolate milk, how it’s made. On study commissioned in the early ’90s found that nearly 1 in 5 adults didn’t know hamburgers are beef. Even more adults didn’t know basic farming facts and practices such as what animals eat or how big a U.S. farm typically is. Seemingly, not…
Southern peach shortage predicted for summer
If you’re from the south, chances are you know summer as the season for a seemingly endless supply of peaches. Peaches are such a part of Georgia that streets and schools bear their name, while the license plate and even ‘I voted’ stickers are adorned with their image. But growers say a massive shortage is in store for this year’s Southern crop. An ill-timed three-day freeze in March paired with an unseasonably warm winter has wiped out much of the Deep South’s peach crop. The already finicky fruit trees were so confused by the weather that many didn’t bear any fruit at all, leading some experts to estimate the production in Georgia will reach only about a quarter of what it was in 2016, when the state produced 43,000 tons of peaches. South Carolina is the country’s number two peach producing state — after California — but its production numbers are looking just as bad. According to…