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The thunder of the storm resonated while, in parallel, the hail stones, the size of tennis balls, fell in large quantities at nine o’clock on Tuesday morning. This is how the citrus producers of Rosario Village, Entre Rios, who never imagined that the warning about a hailstorm would wipe out the production of mandarins and oranges from the area.
“It is painful to see the videos of what was leftIt hit us very hard. We came from a very complex year and this It was devastating. The hail caught the very ripe fruit. There are many mandarin oranges with soft and sensitive skin, and these huge hailstones, some the size of tennis balls, crushed our fruit,” he said. Marcos Dal Mazo, of the Citrus Growers Association of Villa del Rosario. The storm affected what is known as “the town of mandarins”, an area that represents the highest percentage of citrus production per kilo in the province of Entre Ríos and one of the highest in the country. Approximately 400 producers harvest around 150 million kilos of fruit on 5,000 hectares.
The stones that fell in Villa del Rosario
“The size of the hail seen in that area is historic”Dal Mazo explained. The storm, he indicated, covered an area from the Uruguay River, in the northwest, to La Paz, on the border with Santa Fe. It not only affected Villa del Rosario, but also Chajarí, Colonia Ayuí, San Roque and other towns. The first hailstorm, which occurred at 4 AM, was smaller, but the real impact came at 9, when the largest stones finished destroying what little remained of the plants. “That second blow was lethal, it finished turning over what was left,” the producer lamented.
The stones destroyed the summer orange plantations, which are the last variety of the year. This production begins in August and is finished in December, extending into January if the conditions are good. Meanwhile, in the case of the Murcott mandarin, the most abundant variety at this time, the season also extends from September to December. “The campaign was already well underway, with the fruit at its best, sweet and ripe in a good size. We had excellent quality ready to market.“We are not seeing the damage now,” Dal Mazo said. However, most of the fruit will end up on the ground. “The damage is not visible now, it will be visible in the coming days because the one that did not break will be crushed and that one, within the next 10 days, will finish falling,” he said.
Another postcard of the fierce hailstorm
According to the details, they communicated with the Director of Agriculture of Entre Ríos, Gustavo Oertlin, And tomorrow officials would go to the area to tour it and observe the damage. The devastating storm came at a time when producers were beginning to recover from a previous crisis. In the middle of the year, they were forced to throw away thousands of kilos of mandarins due to the lack of buyers and low prices that did not cover production costs. This situation was documented with images of a truck unloading at least 8,000 kilos of mandarins at the local dump.
“The lack of sales in the markets, low prices and high production costs forced us to waste thousands of kilos of fruit”Dal Mazo recalled. However, in recent months the situation had begun to improve due to the drop in the supply of fruit and exports, especially to Brazil and Paraguay. In this area, 70% of production is destined for the domestic market, 10% for export and another 20% for industry.
“We were just starting to recover. Exports to Brazil were doing well, especially because of the HLB disease and the drought that affected production in Santa Catarina, one of the main producing states in Brazil,” the producer explained.
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