Fresh strategies for just-picked produce

Jun 24, 2022

Plus ça change. The French say – preferably over a beverage – that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Tom Komienski, a veteran produce seller at the Ontario Food Terminal (OFT), could easily argue the point that local produce has never meant so much to so many. He’s standing beside boxes brimming with beans, a standard for July. The human impulse for the season’s just-picked never changes. There’s always demand for the al dente tenderness of a locally-grown green bean.

His family has been meeting those needs since 1952, growing Norfolk County vegetables. That 70-year arc of history now includes a world pandemic and that’s prompted changes in farm operations and retailer buying strategies.

“I think there’s a renewed energy to get back to normal,” says Komienski. “The restaurant trade is coming back, looking for that feature ingredient to make an asparagus soup, for example. Most growers are optimistic except for the rising production costs of fuel, fertilizer and containers.”

Normal does not mean status quo. Near Scotland, Ontario, the home farm is now growing more than a thousand acres of vegetables as varied as asparagus, beans, peppers, sweet corn, tomatoes, pumpkins and squash. This is the first year to market organic asparagus. And Komienski notes that independent green grocers-- East Indian, Asian and Arab --are all looking to fill their niche.

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Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.