In the past few weeks, I’ve been travelling a lot to nurseries, and I’ve had the opportunity to talk to many growers. From their point of view, the weather is always reason to complain: too much sun, too little light, too much rain or too dry. From my own experience, and since I grew up in a family of growers, I can sometimes put these things into perspective. It is clear, however, that the weather has a greater influence than before.
In Italy, Spain and France, we cooperate with growers of peonies, and we’ve clearly found that production is lower than before, probably due to warmer winters. This makes it questionable whether peonies can still be cultivated in these regions in the future. In Turkey, I had similar discussions: temperatures were much too high, production had dropped and crops were under more stress. Will there be a shift in production there too?
On to Kenya: too much rain, floods, people dying or becoming homeless… awful. Entire crops being washed off the land, quality issues and air transport that seems to be getting even more unpredictable. The Kenyans have never seen anything like it.
