MARTINSBURG, W.Va. – Freezing temperatures during two critical nights of the growing season last month have decimated a lot of the fruit crops in the Eastern Panhandle.
The last three growing seasons have been pretty challenging for vegetable producers, orchardists and livestock farmers in the Mountain State, particularly in the Eastern Panhandle which is already on its third year of significant drought conditions. Then, in April, there was a string of really hot days followed by a couple of nights during which temperatures dropped well below freezing.
Eli Cook of Spring Valley Farms said they tried to protect their crops overnight during those cold snaps.
“The night of April 8, we had all our staff and friends and you know, I think it was 50-some people and we did fires in our orchards, we ran wind machines, Frost Dragons, row covers, you know, anything and everything we could to try to save our fruit and we did an okay job that that night,” he says. “We came out of it and still had maybe a little less than half a peach crop and a decent apple crop and a few cherries” that had survived.
Temperatures that night got down into the 20s, but it got worse.
“Less than two weeks later, I think it was April 21st, it got down to like 21 to 22 degrees that night.”
Cook said there had been some hot weather in the interim.
“Between those time periods and when you get into those later stages of development, it’s just so hard to protect food,” Cook says. “I mean, it’s really sensitive even at 28 degrees and at 21 degrees, (the fruit) just can’t handle it.”
Only a small percentage of their overall orchard crop was able to survive.
“We really lost a lot on that night,” Cook said.
Cook said his main farming operation is in Augusta, but, “We have one isolated orchard in Romney that that’s a really high elevation that still has some fruit, but for the most part, all our Augusta orchards were damaged pretty severely.”
Spring Valley Farms operates three farm markets (in Romney, Martinsburg, and in nearby Winchester, Virginia), and since Eli Cook was a preteen, he’s been supplying to farmers markets in the DC area.
In a normal year, they’d also be shipping a lot of fruit to the Outer Banks, to Charleston, and to Ohio. This frost has impacted their wholesale operations.
That made for some difficult conversations this season.
“Most of our bigger wholesale customers, we just had to call them and bear the bad news that we we just weren’t going to have anything this year,” Cook said.
“Some of our smaller wholesale customers, you know, if we’re able to source from other areas then we may try to bring in some smaller amounts for those to keep those customers going,” he said, “But some of our bigger customers that were taking a tractor trailer load or two (of produce) a week, there’s just no way.”
Cook said he’ll have to work to get those customers back.
“This thing is not a ‘this year and it’s over.’ I mean, we, we have a lot of things to worry about — getting those customers back, the investments that we can’t do this year on the farm — improvements and things.”
Another Eastern Panhandle grower, Katie Orr-Dove of Orr’s Farm Market in Martinsburg said they lost a significant portion of their fruit crop during those cold April nights.
“Farmers have not ever seen weather like this or it’s been a very long time,” she said, adding area producers are “talking to each other and networking and trying to figure out how to navigate a season where a frost has killed most of what you grow.”
She talked about their crop damage on a recent episode of Panhandle Live.
“We lost a lot of things. We lost our strawberries. We lost all of our sweet and tart cherries. We lost 60 percent of our blueberries.”
Orr-Dove said they are seeing about 40 percent of those berries on the bushes, so “We will have blueberries from our farm.”
“The grapes were very stunted. All of our peaches froze out, all of our nectarines and plums.”
“We have some apples,” she said.
In good years, Orr’s enjoys a robust wholesale apple operation.
Orr-Dove said they are looking at what is growing.
“The one thing is that none of our vegetable gardens were in yet and none of our flower gardens were in yet.”
Orr-Dove said they’re using this time to focus on some expansion projects, really leaning into their vegetable crop and creating events and classes to bring folks to their farm, their barnyard and this fall, their pumpkin patch.
They are also relying on regional growers to help stock the shelves at their bustling farm market.
“So what we’re finding is there’s going to be more collaboration than normal. And it’s going to be outside of maybe the local area, but we’re going to be collaborating with other farmers to try to bring things into our farm market that we can’t grow this season.”