Mexico Freezes Impact Dry Beans, Many Other Crops
By Drew Lerner
Kansas City, January 11 (World Weather Inc.) – Widespread freezing temperatures occurred in northern Mexico during the weekend causing damage to dry beans, a little sugarcane, some early corn, wheat and a number of other fruits and vegetables. 
The coldest conditions produced low temperatures of -11 to zero degrees Celsius and the event was the second of its kind since early December further damaging some crops in the region.
Frost ad freezes occurred as far south as Zacatecas, Mexico during the weekend with the most widespread hard freezes occurring from southern Sinaloa and a huge part of Durango northward through Chihuahua. The region produces winter wheat and dry edible beans with a number of other fruits and vegetables produced there, as well. Sugarcane was impacted, although to a much lesser degree of significance in southern Sinaloa and most of the crops in northern Sinaloa likely escaped hard freezes. Caution is advised over the above graphic because the temperature data density that World Weather, Inc. receives is not high enough to say without any doubts how much of northern Sinaloa was impacted.
A similar freeze event occurred in December that may have impacted up to 60% of the dry bean country and the remaining crop was hurt, although not completely lost. This past weekend’s event may have been significant enough to have further damaged crops that were not permanently damaged in the previous freeze.
North-central Mexico produced nearly 52% of the Mexico dry bean crop in 2007-09. Not much more than 6% of the north-central part of Mexico is irrigated suggesting there was little that producers could do to help artificially raise temperatures in the region as temperatures progressively cooled. 
The northern Pacific coast producing states of Nayarit and Sinaloa produced another 21% of the dry bean crop in 2007-09. Both the upper Pacific Coast and north-central Mexico are responsible for the majority of dry bean production even in more recent years and that fact that so much crop was hurt in the December event does not leave much hope that this past weekend’s freeze was less significant.
Wheat is produced across the region, as well, but most of the winter wheat crop should not have been far enough advanced to be seriously hurt by the freezes, although reports on the advancement of crop development are hard to come by and there may be some exceptions.
Sugarcane and some other fruit and vegetable crops produced in northern Mexico were also impacted and a full assessment of the loss will not be known for a while. World Weather, Inc. believes sugarcane and wheat will likely come out of their damage without much impact.
Winter corn planting is just beginning and any crop that was negatively impacted will be replanted.
Most of Mexico’s important strawberry production region was far removed from the coldest weather with Michoacán being the largest strawberry producer and was located far to the south of the freeze region. Northern Baja California is another important fruit and vegetable production area, but temperatures there were notably warmer and had no threat of damage.
Warming is expected for a while this week, but another bout of cold air will impact northern Mexico briefly Saturday. That cold snap is not expected to be nearly as significant as that which just occurred.
Injured crops would benefit greatly from widespread rain, but such an event is not likely for at least the next week to ten days.
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