Illegals may get laid off due to crop damage.

Feb 19, 2007 3:41 pm US/Eastern

Cold And Frost Do Damage To Local Agriculture

Gary Nelson
Reporting

(CBS4) SOUTHWEST MIAMI-DADE For most residents in Miami-Dade, this morning's odd frost was a little more than an amusing diversion, but in the corn fields and bean fields and nurseries of the county's billion dollar agricultural industry, the cold was calamitous.

Nursery owner Rene Espinosa will know next week whether his ten acres of high end plumeria plants will pull through the cold that burned their tender leaves.

“Around seven days after the frost, if you come by and all the leaves are yellow, we've got a problem,” says Espinosa, who could lose upwards of a $2-million dollar crop, a loss mostly uninsured.

When the ice settles, it freezes the bloom which freezes the bean itself and it falls off. Most farmers were not expecting a heavy frost, let alone the freeze that covered some of his fields.

“I had a friend call me at about three o'clock this morning and he said have you been outside,” said farmer George Wright. “I said no and he said go out and look, I got 29 degrees. I walked out and I had 31.”

Wright figures he has lost at least fifty percent of his bean crop, with some stands a total loss.

Grower John Algier swapped thermometer readings today and surveyed hundreds of acres of half grown corn, corn whose growth has now been stunted.

“In three days time, this will all be brown and black, it's just now starting to show up,” says Algier, who estimates the cold will rob him of at least a quarter of his corn crop.

“We didn't expect to have any frost or freeze last night, the forecast was clean and green,” says Algier. “We ended up, at six o'clock this morning, we were just about solid ice across this field.

The forecast was for higher temperatures, and a good wind to keep the danger down, but the mercury fell further than expected, the wind died, and with it lots of plants, beans and corn.