Drought resulting in smaller, pricier produce; Less honey as bees can't find flowers

The current exceptional drought is hitting Dutch consumers in the wallet and the shopping bag as they pay more for lighter heads of lettuce, smaller cabbages, and fewer, if exceptionally sweet, strawberries. Honey will also likely become even more expensive in the coming period. The summer harvest was very disappointing as bees struggled to find flowers.

Newspaper AD surveyed produce traders, market stalls, greengrocers, and supermarkets. Almost everyone called this an exceptional year due to the drought. Remarkably, there are no gaps in the produce shelves, though the available fruit and vegetables are either smaller or pricier, or both.

“Prices are slightly higher than a month ago,” Bianca Wessel of Wessel Groente & Fruit in Alkmaar told AD. “But the broccoli, the green beans, the leeks - everything simply comes from the Netherlands. Yes, the iceberg lettuce is a bit smaller. And some cabbages. But I hear no complaints. Better expensive than unavailable.”

“We have never experienced anything like this before,” said Lycke van Boekel of Boekel AGF Horecagroothandel, a Den Bosch-based company that supplies caterers and chains. She, too, mentioned changing quality and rising prices. “Lettuce varieties yield less volume and weight per head,” Van Boekel said. Cauliflower is also significantly smaller than normal. “You do have to explain that to customers.”

“The first harvests of seed onions and potatoes are much smaller than normal,” Tineke de Vries, chair of arable farming at LTO Nederland, told the newspaper. “Zeeland growers who were able to irrigate still harvest about 40 tons of onions per hectare. But without irrigation, it sometimes drops to 20 tons.” In a typical year, 80 tons is possible in Flevoland. The same goes for potato yields. “It is noticeable in the price. French fry potatoes are already fetching 30 cents per kilo now; a month ago, that was still 0 cents.”

The persistent drought is also affecting honey production. Flowers are blooming for shorter periods or barely at all, meaning that honey bees are unable to collect nectar, John Hoogendoorn, beekeeper and secretary of the Dutch Beekeepers’ Association, told NOS.

In the summer, bees build up their winter stores in the form of honey. Due to the drought, this is proving impossible, so beekeepers have to supplement with dissolved sugar so that bees have sufficient reserves to get through the winter, never mind the honey harvest, Hoogendoorn explained.

“These are tense times for hobby beekeepers,” Hoogendoorn said. Hobbyists make up about 95 percent of the total beekeeping in the Netherlands. “If you go on a long vacation as a hobby beekeeper during this drought, that can become a problem.”