Even a Greenhouse Can’t Keep Out Mother Nature

Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas

Rows of tomatoes at the new Village Farms greenhouse in Monahans.

A few weeks ago we reported on the grand opening of a massive 15-acre greenhouse growing tomatoes in the Texas desert. The innovative facility from Village Farms uses little water, lots of diffused light and no soil. It also works by keeping Mother Nature (in the form of pests, floods and drought) out.

But sometimes, she’ll just fight her way back in.

Three Village Farms tomato greenhouses in Marfa suffered major damage during an extreme hailstorm on the night of May 31st. According to the company, about 82 acres of greenhouses were affected. Many of the glass windows that form the roofs were shattered.

“It’s a mess. Nothing’s happened like this before,” says Doug Kling, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer with Village Farms. “Occasionally you lose some glass to a bad storm. But nothing like this. The good news is, nobody was hurt.”

Kling says the greenhouse is closed temporarily and the company is calculating how much damage was done.

Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas

Doug Kling says the company has never seen a hailstorm like this before.

“Usually by mid-June we start pulling up the crop and get ready to re-plant and pick again in late August,” Kling says. “So the time it hit wasn’t as critical as it could have been.” But he adds that the damage could total millions of dollars. All of the tomatoes in the greenhouses will have to be thrown out.

“You really can’t prevent this. It’s like a hurricane or a tornado coming,” Kling says. “Some things naturally occur that you can’t do much about. We know it’s a solid structure, we’ve just never had a storm of this intensity. It was just a freak storm.” Village Farms hasn’t had anything like this happen in their twenty-year history.

Village Farms isn’t sure yet how long it will take to get the greenhouses back up and running, but the company says there should be “little to no disruption” of its supply to customers.