“The Houston area was most severely impacted by heavy rains and flooding during the Memorial Day weekend,” says Brent Erenwert with Brother’s Produce. “It received 11 inches of rain in just a few hours,” he added. The Rio Grande Valley, the main fresh produce growing region in Texas, escaped the worst of the rainfall.

“The rain that came down in Rio Grande Valley did not affect much produce as we are nearing the end of the produce season,” said Erenwert. “It’s almost 95⁰F here and too hot for most produce crops like broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage. However, if the heavy rainfall would have happened late April, the impact would have been much more significant,” he said.

According to Erenwert, blueberries were most hit. The Texas blueberry season runs from early/mid-May through the first half of June. It is a very short season and the heavy rainfall caused two weeks of shipment to be lost out of the five-week season. “We weren't able to get Texas blueberries for about a week,” said Erenwert.

Erenwert noted that the heavy rains delayed shipping as some trucks couldn’t move to the urban areas. “I had already scaled back on trucks because of the holiday weekend, but we basically lost two days of shipping instead of one. As of this week, we should be back to shipping as normal,” he finished.

Source - http://www.freshplaza.com/