MARTINSBURG, W.Va. — It was a tough night for farmers in the Shenandoah Valley.
The Eastern Panhandle and surrounding areas were under a freeze warning as a springtime freeze event brought temperatures dangerously low for tender new growth on fruit trees and berry bushes.
Eli Cook from Spring Valley Farms in Romney says they built a series of small fires over several acres as the temperatures dropped down to a range of 21 to 28 degrees overnight into Wednesday morning.
“So we found that if we put like 30 campfire size fires per acre seems to be more effective than doing, you know, big fires,” Cook said in an appearance Wednesday morning on Panhandle Live.
“We were trying to cover around 40 acres. So it was like 1,200 little fires,” Cook said, explaining they started the fires around 1:30 in the morning and kept watch over them for a solid seven hours.
“There was a really cold pocket where we’re at in Hampshire County,” Cook said, saying at one point, the air was 21 degrees on his farm.
“We definitely had some of the coldest temperatures of some of the growers that I talked to,” he said, adding that he had talked to several of his fellow farmers and orchardists about the cold snap.
“Peaches, plums, cherries, apples, strawberries,” Cook said. “Those were the main ones we were trying to protect last night.”
Freezing temperatures are not unprecedented in April, but Eli Cook said warm days in March made this year’s fruit particularly vulnerable.
“The amount of damage is direct correlation to the stage of development,” Cook said. “We’re just really advanced this year because we had some, you know, 85 and 90° days and the fruit advanced so quickly that it put, it in a vulnerable stage for this time of year.”
White House Foods, which has orchards in the Eastern Panhandle and is headquartered out of nearby Winchester, Virginia, employed drones and helicopters to move the air around their apple orchards. In a video posted by National Fruit Product Company CEO David Gum, small fires could also be seen scattered around the orchard area.
Wednesday just before noon, Gum posted a video from a Berkeley County orchard with helicopter noises in the background as he explained how they were being used to keep the air going around the trees. “I think we we did a good job There’s no real frost on the ground, so I think we’ve done a good job keeping this orchard rolling.” Gum said the helicopters flew all night long and would do so until the sun “will start heating us up.”
“Let’s pray that it stays warm from now on so we don’t have to go through — this,” Gum said of the overnight operations.
Producers around the region as far as Strasburg, Virginia and north of the Panhandle spent an anxious night trying to protect young growth on their fruit trees as well as their blueberry and strawberry plants.
Growers say they won’t know the full extent of damage, if any from the freeze, for some time.
In the meantime, the National Weather Service out of Baltimore has issued a freeze watch for sub-freezing temperatures Wednesday night, warning that temps could dip as low as 29 degrees.