BIG CHILL'S HIGH COST; ORANGES MAY TRIPLE IN PRICE.

Byline: Todd S. Purdum The New York Times

A brutal, four-day freeze has destroyed more than one-third of California's annual citrus crop, inflicting upward of a half-billion dollars in damage and raising the prospect of tripled orange prices in supermarkets by next week.

Throughout the Golden State, cold, dry air from the Gulf of Alaska sent temperatures below freezing beginning Monday, with readings in the high teens and low 20s in the agriculturally rich Central Valley early Thursday - the worst cold spell since a 10-day freeze in 1990. Farmers frantically ran wind and irrigation machines overnight, but officials pronounced the lemon crop a near-total loss in the valley and said perhaps half of the state's orange crop was lost as well.

``This should be a time of joy, but it's been a bitter disappointment,'' Bob Krauter, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau in Sacramento, the state's largest agricultural organization, said of the Christmas-week freeze. ``We've had more than our share of challenges from Mother Nature this year, with El Nino early on bringing excessive moisture and cold weather that delayed planting and increased pest infestation and disease problems.''

Indeed, agricultural officials said, the late planting meant that more of the state's navel orange crop remained on trees than usual this week and thus susceptible to freezing. California grows about 80 percent of the nation's oranges eaten as fruit and 90 percent of the lemons, and wholesalers said the retail prices of oranges could triple in the next few days. Lemon prices are likely to rise as well. (Prices of frozen orange juice will probably not be greatly affected because most juice oranges are grown in Florida.)

In some California markets, wholesalers reported that the price of navel oranges had gone from 35 cents a pound Tuesday to 90 cents a pound Wednesday.

The citrus industry accounts for well over $1 billion of the state's $27 billion agricultural output. But from the Central Coast to the Imperial Valley, the cold also threatened crops from avocados to strawberries and celery.

Years to recover

The freeze hit especially hard in the towns up and down the San Joaquin Valley, which took years to recover from the last big freeze and where some counties already have unemployment rates of at least 15 percent, three times the national average. Officials were preparing to seek state and federal disaster aid next week.

``In a nutshell, it was way too cold for way too long,'' said Gary Kunkel, assistant agriculture commissioner in Tulare County, which has 100,000 acres of orange groves, about half the state's production. He estimated Thursday that 85 percent of the citrus crop remaining on trees was already lost, about $370 million of its $500 million annual total.

``We've had some places below 25 degrees for 13 or 14 hours at a time,'' Kunkel added, noting that warmer weather predicted for this weekend was coming too late to do much good. ``Imagine watching somebody just tear up your annual paycheck right in front of your eyes.''

When oranges suffer a hard freeze, the juice sacs inside crystallize and burst through the membranes. When the flesh thaws, the juice seeps out and evaporates through the skin, leaving the insides dry and inedible.

El Nino impact

Because of El Nino-related planting delays and poor pollination caused by excess moisture, the California citrus crop was already expected to be about 20 percent below last year's, said Keith Collins, chief economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.

``We were already on track to have a much-reduced crop,'' he said.

The freeze capped a year of weather-related calamities around the nation that produced mixed results for the nation's agriculture industry. The moist El Nino conditions led to record yields on winter wheat in Texas and the Plains states, and record summer heat and drought caused declines in cotton, cattle and other crops and commodities from California to Texas, New Mexico and Louisiana.

In Florida, continued warm weather and drought have led to sharply lower citrus crop forecasts. The Florida Department of Citrus estimates this year's harvest will produce 190 million boxes of oranges, down from last year's record harvest of 244 million boxes.

During summer, fires and drought in central Florida caused an estimated $150 million in damage to crops and destroyed $400 million worth of timber.

``What's particularly curious, even stunning, about this year is that for all the weather turmoil we still wound up with many near-record crop yields'' in corn and soybeans in states like Illinois, Indiana and Iowa, Collins said.

But the high yields also produced low prices for many crops, and together with the weather-related damage in selected areas, led to passage of the biggest agricultural relief measure in the nation's history at $5.7 billion, Collins said. ``There are air pockets of financial stress all across the country,'' he added.

Darwin Smith, an orange grower in Orland, Calif., about 100 miles north of Sacramento, knows that stress firsthand. He expects to lose his entire 75-acre crop this year, more than 100,000 cartons, which would have brought him $50,000. He and other farmers who formed a packing plant will have to lay off about 40 workers.

``I think at this point right now, the chances of anything being harvestable are just about nil,'' Smith said. ``We'll know better when we go in next week and start cutting fruit, but at this point, if there was anything salvageable, I'd be shocked.''

Second loss

This is the second time Smith has lost his entire crop to a freeze in his 13 years of farming, and the federal crop insurance he buys will cover only about half his expected loss. His family will have to rely on income from his wife's job and a part-time job he works each summer, but he dismissed any suggestion of leaving farming.

``You've got to realize that growing oranges is always going to be a risk,'' he said.

In Lindsay, Calif., the LoBue Bros. packing plant, Tulare County's largest employer, laid off 450 of its 500 employees Wednesday, and company officials said it could be two weeks before they know whether they will need their usual crew of pickers and packers for navel and Valencia oranges.

``Four hundred and fifty people are not going to show up on Monday, they're not going to get paid, they're not coming to work,'' said Joe LoBue, the company's marketing director. ``And we don't know when they will come back.

``If in fact these people don't go back to work for a long period of time, it starts to affect the whole economy of the county here. In 1990, you had a lot of people that showed up at food banks, a lot of people who ended up on welfare, a lot of people who couldn't get jobs.''

Robert Ward, a citrus farmer in Exeter, Calif., about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco in the San Joaquin Valley, was up at 4 a.m. Thursday, checking water pumps and wind machines designed to raise the temperature on his 250 acres. Despite the efforts, Ward, a fifth-generation farmer, said the damage was severe.

``It's the only way of life I know,'' he said. ``I'm 60 years old and it's too late to start over. I don't know what else I'd do. I've done it pretty much all my life.

``We'll make it. It's going to get tight around here. We're not going to upgrade any new equipment. We're just going to get by as best we can, and see what happens next season.''