For the young Rudolph Hass, life was a series of frustrations.
He couldn’t join the US Army during World War I because of a heart condition. In 1923, he moved with his wife Elizabeth from Milwaukee to Pasadena, where he knocked on doors to sell, at first, socks and ties door-to-door, and then, washing machines. Two years later, Hass joined the post office and delivered mail for 25 cents an hour, but continued to dream bigger.
A magazine article gave him the idea that there was a fortune to be made in growing avocadoes. Hass happened on a variety of avocado that was particularly tasty and high-yielding, and today, the multi-billion-dollar avocado industry rests on his accidental discovery.
It’s that industry which is facing disruption due to the 25% tariff President Donald Trump just imposed on products from Mexico, where most of the avocados Americans consume are grown. On Monday, Trump backed off a bit, after a call with Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum. He paused the tariffs for 30 days to allow for trade negotiations.
If the tariffs go ahead, we could see "pretty significant increases in the price of avocados,” David Ortega, a food economist and professor at Michigan State University, predicted.
“Maybe not the full 25%, but pretty close, given that there's very little substitute ability with regards to where we would source avocados."
Made in Mexico
The odds are that the guacamole you’ll eat at a Superbowl party will be made with Hass avocados, and that the fruit will be grown in Mexico. Avocados aren’t a daily necessity and paying an additional 25 or 50 cents for one isn’t likely to bust someone’s grocery budget by itself, but the industry can be viewed as a microcosm for the flaws of the impendingTrump tariffs.
The president insisted they were necessary to fight the importation of the deadly drug Fentanyl, but he’s also justified increased tariffs on the grounds that foreign countries have been cheating the United States for decades, that the measures can create new jobs and benefit U.S. companies and that duties from tariffs could lift the burden of income taxes on workers.
Instead, it is American workers who will pay higher prices for imported goods, and if American companies are even able to expand production, their prices will be higher too.
“In a populist bid to protect our dwindling manufacturing workforce,” Andy Kessler wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “economically clueless Trump whisperers push tariffs. A select few workers may be helped, but most Americans will be worse off—though I doubt we’ll see riots protesting higher prices on made-in-China Gap clothes, Barbie dolls or Hush Puppies shoes. But new Trump tariffs will raise prices and restrict other countries from affording our high-margin exports—drugs, phones, planes and many software and artificial-intelligence services. That’s dumb.”
In fact, the Journal’s editorial board called the Trump tariffs “The Dumbest Trade War in History.” Penalizing Mexico and Canada for fentanyl through tariffs “makes no sense,” The Journal wrote. “Drugs have flowed into the U.S. for decades, and will continue to do so as long as Americans keep using them. Neither country can stop it.”
A taste for avocados
Americans have fallen for the avocado big time.
On average, we consume nearly 9 pounds per person annually, compared to about 1 pound in 2001. But that growing appetite hasn’t been fed by California’s avocado growers. Instead, the rise in production has come from imports, mostly from Mexico, according to the USDA: “Imported avocados now account for 90 percent of the domestic supply compared with 40 percent in the early 2000s.”
“Avocados’ popularity among healthy eaters is unsurprising, given that they are rich in nutrients and healthy fats but relatively low in calories compared to other healthful foods,” according to the University of Florida.
Production of avocados in the U.S. has been falling, as a result of pressure to use land for residential and commercial development, adverse weather, wildfires and higher costs for water and labor. The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration seems only likely to exacerbate a labor shortage in California’s avocado groves.
A long history
Avocados have been consumed for thousands of years, but they were new to the Spanish conquerors of the Americas in the 16th century. A historian accompanying Hernán Cortés, who defeated the Aztec empire and seized Mexico in the early 16th century, wrote,
They are large trees, with broad leaves similar to those of the laurel, but larger and more green. They bear pears weighing a pound and even more, though some weigh less, and the color and shape is that of true pears, and the rind somewhat thicker, but softer, and in the center of the fruit is a seed like a peeled chestnut...and between this and the rind is the part which is eaten, which is abundant and is a paste similar to butter and of very good eating and of good taste, and such that those who have these fruits guard them and esteem them highly and the trees are wild as are the others which I have mentioned, for the chief gardener is God, and Indians apply no work whatever to them. The pears are excellent when eaten with cheese, and they are gathered before they are ripe and stored, and when treated thus they ripen perfectly for eating but after they have reached this stage they spoil quickly if allowed to stand.
In 1672 a physician to England’s King Charles II came across the avocado in Jamaica, writing that it was “One of the most rare and pleasant fruits of the island. It nourisheth and strengtheneth the body, corroborating the spirits and procuring lust exceedingly.” (The Aztec name for avocado was ahuacatl, meaning “testicle.”)
Hass’s venture
Rudolph Hass bought an acre and a half of land with some avocado trees in La Habra Heights, California. Hass then obtained seeds from A. R. Rideout, who experimented with different varieties of the plant, and the mailman planted them in his grove.
The most common kind of avocado in California then was the Fuerte (Spanish for “strong”), an unusually hardy variety imported from Mexico. Fuerte trees had survived a frost in California in 1913.
Hass’s plan was to graft the Fuerte on to the young trees he was tending, but one of the plants kept rejecting the graft, according to Hass’ granddaughter Cindy Miller.
The fruit of that tree, bearing skin which turned black when ripe, was particularly tasty. The plant also had a long growing season.
Hass not only cultivated the variety at his grove and later on an 80-acre farm, but patented the Hass avocado. He made less than $5,000 from the patent, but the Hass avocado conquered the industry. By 2005, it was planted on more than 92% of the avocado farm acreage in California, according to the University of California’s Agriculture and Natural Resources department, and it accounts for most of the avocados imported to the US.
The “mother tree” of the Hass avocado survived until 2002.
Hass himself died of heart failure in 1952, but Miller said her grandmother lived to the age of 98, regularly eating “a half piece of wheat toast with avocado slices on it with breakfast.” She was way ahead of the Millennials.
Thanks Rich for the usual readable, well-researched (and how!) piece. The world surely seems topsy-turvy at the moment. Can't grow avocados in Greenland, but Mars?
You would think that Rudolph Hass would have changed his name when Rudolf Hess became globally notorious. He could have gone with Rudy Avocado or Rudy Guac. Anyway, an excellent piece, as usual.