Posted on 05/19/2014 7:26:06 PM PDT by Aunt Polgara
IRWINDALE>> Sriracha maker David Tran was succinct when it came to his requirements for any place where he might expand his popular hot sauce business.
“(We) must have chilies,” Tran said at a news conference where he announced he was considering an expansion to the Lone Star State.
Last week, a delegation of Texas politicians, who have actively courted Tran via social media and open letters, toured the Azusa Canyon Road factory.
Texas is known as a pepper-growing region, however, Craig Underwood, who grows all of the jalapeños that are crushed into the iconic roster sauce, said it would take years to start growing crops for processing in Texas.
“Moving or even expanding an operation like this is a huge challenge,” Underwood said in an interview. “It’s taken us years to find varieties and growing areas here.”
Testing a variety, which must be bred, to putting it into production takes at least three to four years, he said.
The majority of Texas-grown peppers are sold at markets and not processed in hot sauces or salsa, agriculture experts said. In a survey last year of the pepper crop in Texas, about 450 acres were dedicated to growing chili peppers, said Marco Palma, an associate professor and economist in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M.
Underwood will plant 2,000 acres of peppers this season on dozens of farms in Ventura and Kern counties, which will produce about 58,000 tons of chilies.
Ten to 15 years ago Texas had a larger crop of hot pepper varieties, but that market has moved to Mexico, said Daniel Leskovar, director of the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center and professor in the Department of Horticultural Sciences. About 1,500 acres of Texas farms are dedicated to growing all varieties of peppers, he said.
Leskovar said the regions that produce jalapeño and other hot pepper varieties are West Texas, Southwest Texas, regions near the Mexican border, and the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas.
“We’d be happy to see some potential growth in that area ... it could be historical,” Leskovar said.
While Texas has a climate conducive to growing peppers, the state is also subject to Texas-sized variabilities in weather, Underwood said, including hurricanes, hail and droughts.
“We have problems here, but they may not be quite the magnitude they can be there,” said Underwood.
For example, a wind storm last year in Kern County destroyed several acres of peppers, although Underwood had enough time to re-plant some of the crop.
The severe drought that California is experiencing will likely not harm the crop this season, Underwood said, although some of his wells have been pulled.
But that could change if the predicted El Niño doesn’t arrive.
“If we don’t get rain, we’re really up the creek,” he said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently raised the probability for El Niño conditions developing before the end of the year to 78 percent, which will lead to a wetter winter in California.
Underwood and his operations manager Jim Roberts left the Texas delegation with requests for more information about the state’s agriculture industry.
Tran said if the demand for his hot sauce continues, he will outgrow his 650,000 square-foot, $40 million Irwindale plant by 2017. Irwindale sued his company, Huy Fong Foods, in Los Angeles County Superior Court last fall because some residents said harsh odors wafting from the Sriracha factory burned their eyes, caused them to choke and forced them to stay indoors.
Other California municipalities have also been courting Tran.
Irwindale Mayor Mark Breceda said Wednesday he, another city councilman and representatives from the governor’s office will tour the Sriracha plant in the coming weeks.
The City Council on Wednesday delayed its vote on a resolution that would put Tran under a 90-day time frame to fix the problems at his factory that the council said created a public nuisance.
It’s a lot more complicated than just planting them and eating them for commercial uses. You need a consistent product year in and year out so you have to test cultivars, maybe even make your own cultivars to get the consistency you want. Climate and soil has a huge effect on peppers.
For commercial purposes, yes. I was just referring to personal or perhaps micro-farming use. We till about a 1,000 square feet for our main plot, and use tubs and other raised beds to supplement. We try to use heirloom and non-GMO seed when possible, and avoid store-bought seed when we can. Sometimes it doesn’t yield as big a crop, but the quality is better. This is only our second year on this new property, so it’s a work in progress. And with us both having just crossed that AARP rubicon, health concerns create just enough background noise to put a governor on how headlong we move. LOL
Irwindale want$ to be paid off, but i$ too $mart to put it in $o few word$.
Industry, which extends about 15 miles along San Jose Creek but has about 150 registered voters is another such "city," as is Vernon, which once had a "mayor" who claimed what was clearly an office building to be his residence.
Coffee is blended from various different coffee beans to produce the “preferred” taste. There is really no reason why the same can’t be done with peppers - there are plenty of super hot peppers grown in Mexico to blend with more mild peppers grown in the U.S.
Industry, which extends about 15 miles along San Jose Creek but has about 150 registered voters is another such “city,” as is Vernon, which once had a “mayor” who claimed what was clearly an office building to be his residence.
Don’t forget Cudahy, City of Commerce, Compton, and all the other little LA County Fiefdoms. It probably doesn’t really matter now that LA is Mexico City del Norte, but they should have closed down all these places decades ago. I drive to LA once a year and it is just stunning what a $hit hole it’s become in my lifetime. At the end of the day they are going to have to wall off everything south of I-10.
One of my aunts grew up in Compton, a town where two US presidents-George and George W. Bush—once lived. The Bush family residence, at the corner of Santa Fe and Myrrh, was bulldozed sometime after 2002, when I last saw it. When she lived there, Barbara Bush described Compton as “lovely.”
Then you had better get started.
Consider East Tennessee, the next breadbasket of America now that soviet California has fallen. Over the long term, Texas may suffer the same fate.
Acres and acres of peppers grown in Southern Ar for Tabasco and Louisianne hot sauce. Down by Transylvania just look for the Bat on the water tower.
I’ve never seen a place (with soil, not rock — and a little water) in Texas that wouldn’t grow peppers — and plenty-hot ones!
It’s nothing less than a shakedown by the Irwindale crime family that runs the city.
When the Pineapple express is running though (like 1969) there can be some serious rain real fast.
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