After selling fruit grown in their backyard to family, friends and neighbors for about five years, the four Ferrari sisters had collected nearly $1,500.
But what to do with all that money? At ages 7, 6, 4 and 1, cars and college tuition aren’t necessarily on the forefront of the Ferrari girls’ minds, so they took a trip to Disney World.
But this year, JJ, GiGi, DD and BB — nicknames granted to them by their dad, Randle Ferrari — had hardly any mangoes to sell or eat themselves, and neither did a lot of South Florida residents and farms. The stark scarcity of mangoes this season came as a result of wonky weather conditions during the region’s dry season, leaving many trees bare.
From his luscious, fruit-tree filled backyard in Parkland, Ferrari said he’s usually “mangoed out” by now, but this season has been the worst he’s seen in the six years since he and his family moved to their home and began growing their own fruit.
“This year’s been garbage [for mangoes],” he said.
Experts concur. Jeff Wasielewski, a commercial tropical fruit extension agent at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences in Homestead, said this year was “terrible” for mango production, especially in comparison to last year’s bumper crop.
“This year was very, very low,” Wasielewski said.
Because last year’s bounty was so fertile, Wasielewski said this season’s harvest may have been lighter due to the trees being worn out, but the primary blame gets placed on the weather.
Mango trees typically flower between December and April, and Wasielewski said lots of dry wind “knocked off some of the pollen.”
The most explosive blow came in the form of rain when the mango trees began to bloom, which generally happens during South Florida’s supposed dry season. Rain spurs disease in the flowers and budding fruit, Wasielewski said.
“When they started to bloom, there was a lot of rain, and that’s the dry season, and that’s not normal,” he said. “Usually you get the bloom, you get the fruit, it’s nice and dry, and then later when the fruit needs to get pumped up, then you start getting a little rain, and they fatten up.
“But this time when the fruit was small and the flowers were there, we got a lot of rain, which is not typical at all. And therefore you get this atypical fruit mango crop that’s very small because that doesn’t usually happen.”
Last year, South Florida saw a strong El Niño year, meaning moisture from the Gulf of Mexico steers storms across the Southern United States to Florida. In December, for example, South Florida was under a flood watch for what ended up being days of rain and 2 to 3 inches of water in parts of Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
Mango season in South Florida falls from about to May to September, Wasielewski said. Because of how little the yield was this year, the season’s peak hit in the beginning of July, which is early.
If people don’t have mangoes now, Wasielewski said they’re certainly out of luck for the rest of the season.
Randle Ferrari and his family were some of those unfortunate, mango-less souls. They have two mango trees in their backyard, a hulking Valencia Pride mango tree and a more modest Island Honey mango tree.
Valencia Pride mangoes are quite common in South Florida, but both trees have been devoid of much fruit this summer, and the mangoes that did grow were light green, firm and smaller than what the Ferrari family is used to, which is bulbous, sugary fruit.
Ferrari and his family grow a host of other plants — coconuts, peach and pigeon peas, just to name a few — and selling mangoes was never about profit, anyway, so this summer’s loss was manageable.
“It’s for the kids, you know, it started off like a lemonade stand,” he said. “They need to learn where food comes from, where money comes from, learn community and learn commerce.”
For Walter and Verna Zill, the loss has been more consequential.
Verna said their public orchard, Zill’s Mangos in Boynton Beach, usually sees fruit through August, but that has not been the case this year. Because so many homeowners are experiencing the same thing, they are flocking to places like the Zill farm in search of mangoes.
“We’ve got more customers and less fruit to go around,” Verna said.
Rather than closing at 7 p.m. like normal, Verna said they close when they run out of fruit, which has been between 3 and 5 p.m.
“We’re losing maybe a third of our income,” she said. “As farmers, we are used to taking a loss now and then.”
Not everyone fared poorly. On social media forums such as Facebook, some users said they still had an abundance of mangoes, with one user saying it was their biggest yield yet.
Even Wasielewski said he had a couple of trees that did well, despite the circumstances.
“Nature is very, very complex, but I would say the easy answer is microclimate,” he said. “But I can’t really explain why. I would say it’s probably cultivar and maybe size, how it was pruned.”
And, contrary to popular belief, mango seasons do not oscillate; there is not a pattern of an “on” year followed by an “off” year.
“This could have been a little off, on just because last year was so big that the trees might have been a little stressed out. But there are all those other factors too,” Wasielewski said. “I would say this is a blip. If we see it two more years in a row, then we might be a little worried.”
If he had to bet, next year’s return will be much better, especially if people keep up with pruning their trees.
“Next year they’ll taste all the sweeter,” he said.
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