"Florida Oranges May Have 5% Damage, AccuWeather Says" and "Orange Juice Futures Tumble at Open"

We were asked last week why we weren't following the OJ market. The simple answer is, although we blog in real time, in some markets it's not fast enough. The terms "lock limit up" and "lock limit down" should strike the same terror into traders as "liquidation only" did to the Hunt brothers back in the 1980 silver market.
When speculating in this kind of market you should hedge by owning a little Berkshire Hathaway.
BRK owns Fruit of the Loom and should you or your fellow traders soil their tidy (tighty) whities, you're covered.
The futures were limit up on Friday.
From Bloomberg:

Florida’s orange crop may have suffered at least 5 percent damage from freezing weather this morning, in what was likely the coldest night of the current spell of unusually low temperatures, AccuWeather Inc. said.

The coldest weather was in the state’s western orange groves, while fruit in the central part and the east of the growing region probably remained unharmed, Dale Mohler, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, said by phone.

Florida is the world’s biggest orange grower after Brazil. Oranges can be damaged when temperatures fall below 28 degrees Fahrenheit (-2.2 degrees Celsius) for several hours or more, and temperatures in the western third of the growing region fell to an average 24 to 28 Fahrenheit, according to Mohler.

Overall crop damage will be “at least 5 percent,” Mohler said from State College, Pennsylvania. “There are enough places that are in the mid 20s in the west. The western crop is where the damage happened. The east coast, it doesn’t look like there was any damage there.”>>>MORE

The futures are down 3.27% right now. From MarketBeat:

Orange Juice Futures Tumble at Open

Orange juice futures fell sharply as trading began Monday on the IntercontinentalExchange as record low temperatures continued to rake across Florida, breaking record lows set more than 80 years ago. Prices touched their downward limit as the cold weather generated fear of significant damage to the orange juice crop.

The National Weather Service said overnight temperatures at the Miami airport Monday dipped to 36 degrees, beating the previous low of 37 set in 1927. Though cold weather systems sometimes pass through, it’s rare for them to linger so long. The average temperature this time of year in South...MORE