Unusual weather forces apple farmers to trim pick-your-own programs, buy from other growers to sell in stores
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Photo credit: MARC GOLUB
Bad weather has wiped out much of the apple crop at Patterson Fruit Farm, according to co-owner Bill Patterson. This year, Ohio orchards are expected to yield about a third of the apples they produced in 2009.
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Walking his family's sixth-generation Chesterland farm, David Patterson stops before a row of McIntosh apple trees.
So this is what 90% crop loss looks like.
“These have not been picked yet, and you can see — there are no apples,” said Mr. Patterson, who, with his parents and brother, Bill, owns Patterson Fruit Farm.
It's a late September day — typically peak harvest time for apples — and the farm's trees are an unforgiving sea of green.
“You can see that it's across the board,” Mr. Patterson said, stepping to his left and touching an Idared tree. “This tree here would probably have two bushels of apples, about 150 to 200 apples. It has two.”
Though its pick-your-own apples program — where visitors can pick produce off the trees — arguably is the farm's biggest draw in the fall, Patterson Fruit Farm announced last week on its Facebook page that it has cut the program short by nearly a month.
Slim pickings are causing similar cancellations throughout Northeast Ohio. About an hour south of Chesterland, Kuner's Fruit Farm in Green for only the second time since its opening in 1947 cancelled pick-your-own altogether because it lost 60% of its crop. The farm is selling the apples that did grow at its retail market and is using them to make cider, said Rosemarie Kuner, co-owner.
And Heavenly Hill Farm in North Royalton announces its cancellation via voicemail.
“Unfortunately, we do not have any apple picking this year due to the frost,” a woman's voice greets callers. “But we do have fresh apples in our store ... and we have lots of pumpkins, too, so stop by and visit us.”
Coming a cropper
While many Northeast Ohioans cheered the abnormally warm weather last March, Ohio apple growers could smell trouble.
“We actually went into bloom a month earlier than normal,” said Bill Dodd, owner of Dodd's Hillcrest Orchards in Amherst and president of the Ohio Fruit Growers Marketing Association.
As an apple tree progresses toward bloom, the temperatures its fruit can withstand decrease. So when late April delivered freezing temperatures, it wiped out a lot of crop, Mr. Dodd said.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's forecast, the state of Ohio's crop for 2012 will be down 41% from 2011. As a whole, U.S. apple production is projected to be 14% less than it was in 2011.
Farms east of Cleveland suffered the most damage and farms west of Cleveland lost generally half their crop, while orchards in Columbus actually have 80% to full crop, Mr. Dodd said.
“The blooms froze and were unable to make an apple,” said Mr. Dodd, whose own Hillcrest Orchards probably lost 50% to 60% of its crop. “There's not really anything you can do about it.”
Some have tried, though: Bauman Orchards in Rittman had a crew of 10 who kept fires burning throughout the orchards overnight on three occasions this spring, said Dianna Bauman, the wife of one of the owners of the three-family operation.
Like other orchards, Bauman also used frost fans to keep warm air close to the earth. Unlike other orchards, its losses this year are “minimal,” maybe 15% to 20%, Ms. Bauman said.
“We're one of the few in the area that did survive, and we are thankful,” she said. “We are getting a lot of new customers that have never been here before.”
Put it in the rearview
As Ms. Bauman indicates, in some cases one orchard's loss is another's gain.
In the first weekend that Bauman Orchards opened its 20-year-old fall festival this year, it reaped record sales, Ms. Bauman said. It also is selling apples wholesale to orchards that need apples to sell.
“We got a lot of new calls from people (growers) we had never heard from before,” Ms. Bauman said. “(My husband) is trying to do the best that he can to supply the demand.”
It isn't a surprise that apple and cider prices are up, though increased crops in other states, such as Washington, are helping to offset losses elsewhere.
Even with crop loss of a magnitude it hasn't seen in probably 40 years, Patterson Fruit Farm doesn't anticipate a loss this year. It still has apples from other local farmers to sell, and it also offers a Family Fun Fest, complete with a corn maze, wagon rides and pick-your-own pumpkins, of which there are “tons,” Bill Patterson said.
Added David Patterson, “Without that diversification, it would have been a really tough year for us.”
Diversification and crop insurance help farmers mitigate such “devastating” losses, said Mark W. Seetin, director of regulatory and industry affairs for the U.S. Apple Association.
“You don't just bounce back the next year from a loss of this scope,” Mr. Seetin said. “It is really dependent on future years, what your production is, the prices you're able to receive for what you produce.”
This year's losses likely will prompt some farms to cut expenses and delay new investments, predicted Mr. Dodd in Amherst, who said it's hard to say whether his own farm's pick-your-own will be abbreviated. Even those with crop insurance will feel the pinch because crop insurance covers only costs, not the revenues farmers would have made, he noted.
“I'm sorry to see it, because if you're in the apple business, you've had some sort of bad luck in your career,” Mr. Dodd said. “The good news is that this year will be in the rearview mirror very quickly.”
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