Andrew’s Aftermath : Fruit Growers and Nursery Owners Vow to Dig In and Rebuild

FLORIDA CITY, Fla. — New growth is already sprouting from the ugly stumps of the surviving avocado trees. Lime farmers have begun stripping healthy branches, wrapping them with moss and aluminum foil to make new lime trees practically from scratch.

And the notorious commercial tomato--the one that tastes like cardboard when it arrives up north in January, the most important of all farm products to this mangled community below Miami--is being planted now, just a few weeks late.

But such signs of rebirth from Hurricane Andrew are premature. Those avocado trees will take a year or two to recover, and the little lime trees will need four to five years to reach their full gin-and-tonic-bearing capacity.

Meanwhile, will the suddenly homeless farm workers, scattered to parts unknown, be back to harvest the tomatoes and other winter vegetables? Will the badly wrecked equipment be fixed in time to pack them? Will the market be glutted with vegetables as competitors from Mexico and west Florida rush in to exploit the agricultural aftermath of the brutal storm?

“Who in the hell knows?” thundered Rosario Strano, the fiery owner of Strano Farms, a big tomato grower here. “Agriculture in Florida is like the Chinese saying: ‘He who rides the tiger cannot let go.’ ”

Andrew dodged Florida’s larger and better known orange, lemon and grapefruit territories, directing his fiercest energy at a 50-mile swath of rough farm country in the south half of Dade County known mostly to outsiders as a nondescript stretch they pass through on the way to the Keys.

Along with Homestead Air Force Base, agriculture is the economic base of the area. The U.S. Agriculture Department figures the storm’s damage to south Florida crops and agricultural infrastructure at $850 million, a blow that will linger through the decade as nature regenerates at her own pace and drags out the region’s recovery. Preliminary USDA estimates point to $150 million in damage to Louisiana farms, most in sugar cane-growing regions.

For now the farmland in south Florida, stretching west from U.S. Highway 1 to the Everglades, suggests some mad artist’s landscape.

In all directions, avocado and mango trees have been snapped off three or four feet above ground, creating broad vistas of bare, jagged stumps. Nearly all lime trees were uprooted and blown elsewhere, some landing in huge matted mountains of unrecognizable, browned foliage with branches twisted and entwined.

Entire nurseries are gone except for the broken frames of shade houses. An occasional lone, stripped palm tree, snapped off at the top and masquerading as a telephone pole, dots the landscape.

These scenes are interrupted by clear, plowed, tidy fields awaiting the winter vegetables that will be planted this month and next.

Agriculture’s claimed local impact of $900 million annually owes much to its southernmost location, said Anne E. Moseley, a farm economist at the University of Florida. The subtropical locale normally gives South Dade farmers a critical two- or three-week head start on their competition in the winter vegetable sweepstakes, especially in tomatoes, beans, potatoes, yellow squash and corn.

The brief delay caused by the storm means the vegetable growers will “miss all the early markets,” Strano said, costing them the time advantage that enables them to compete. But economists expect no big long-lasting price hikes across the country this winter, except perhaps in limes.

To the contrary, farmers here fear the opposite: that tomato growers from Mexico and the Florida towns of Naples and Immokalee will plant more heavily than usual to grab market from the tardy South Dade growers, causing a glut that will send prices tumbling for everyone--a boon to consumers but “ruining the market” for Strano and fellow growers.

That issue could be moot if, as has already begun to happen, the pool of farm labor dries up. For several reasons, including recent disaster relief payments and Andrew’s devastation of the rickety housing occupied by so many farm workers, growers complain that workers have vanished.

“I have 60 people on my payroll and 12 have come back,” said Strano, who’s been cleaning up wreckage himself.

This region centered on the small city of Homestead is also hospitable to limes and mangoes--producing 90% of all grown in the United States--and a dizzying array of such tropical fruits and vegetables as the malanga, boniato, calabaza, cassava, tindora, mamey sapote, lychee, carambola and luffa.

The area also has, or had, more than half of Florida’s nation-leading foliage nursery industry. Dade’s nurseries rang up $171 million in sales in 1990.

Some farmers, especially the smallest operators in the area’s hardest-hit nursery and lime industries, will have no choice but to climb off the tiger, said economist Moseley: “The question we all have is how many will just say: ‘That’s it’ ?”

But most others seem determined to keep riding the beast, figuring the unique climate and geography that brought them here in the first place will once again provide them and their children a living. And they seem strangely confident that nothing like Andrew will come their way again.

“As long as I live, as long as you live, nobody in this entire country will ever see a storm like this,” said an emotional Herbert Yamamura, 58, whose entire lime grove was blown away.

“I could go retire, collect the insurance and pay off my bank debts, but that’s not the answer,” he said. “The answer is to rebuild so people have jobs. I have cried enough, I’m not going to do it any more.”

A Japanese immigrant who started out in this country picking limes nearly 40 years ago, Yamamura now owns Limeco Inc. in nearby Princeton, Fla., a growing, packing, shipping and export-import business that had $14 million in sales last year and employed nearly 300.

Like virtually everyone here, Yamamura is waiting to be dealt his hand by the insurance company, the electric utility and the federal government relief package. During a conversation in his cluttered office this week, he was interrupted with an estimate that it will cost $865,000 to replace the ruined conveyor system in his packing house--more than his insurance coverage on the entire plant--and by a man from Florida Power & Light who said power would be restored “in three or four weeks.”

“No! I’m dead,” he said.

But in fact, Yamamura expected a shipment of 44,000 pounds of Honduran limes the next day, his first piece of business since Andrew. He must count on importing, low-cost loans and insurance settlements to stay alive until his 1,200 acres of lime and avocado groves rise again.

He is readying an old, still-standing wing of the packing plant and, with a $13,000 generator he just bought on credit, will repackage the truckload of Honduran limes and ship them to large national grocery chains. The payoff: maybe $4,000 in income.

“We will do anything we can to survive,” he said.

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