After Easter cold spell, US farmers tally losses

Already gone are 95 percent of South Carolina's $35 million peach crop and 90 percent of North Carolina's potential $25 million apple harvest.

By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the April 11, 2007 edition

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ATLANTA - From the front porch, everything looked normal.

But when Linda Steele, an apple and peach grower in northwest Alabama, stepped into her orchard, her heart sank. Every bud she inspected had turned black. "It's a total loss," she says.

Usually it's hurricanes and ice storms, drought and floods, that do harm to the nation's breadbasket. This time, it was an Easter cold snap that rolled over the South and Midwest with a vengeance. Peach and apple crops have been wiped out. Strawberry, blueberry, and blackberry growers struggled with limited success to save their fruits. Wheat, corn, and alfalfa crops also took a heavy whack.

While it is expected to take several weeks to tally up growers' losses around the region, many farmers already know the damage is significant. Already gone are 95 percent of South Carolina's $35 million peach crop and 90 percent of North Carolina's potential $25 million apple harvest. Some states, including Georgia, may ask for federal emergency aid to cope.

The dire situation was brought about by a confluence of metrological events – an unseasonably warm March punched out in early April by a major cold snap. And it serves as a powerful example of how farmers may need to start adjusting crop variants and field methods to accommodate gradual climate change, agronomists say.

"This is what you might expect [of global warming]," says Jeff Volenec, an agronomist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. "It isn't necessarily always a warmer climate, but a more variable climate."

Though subzero April temperatures down in the Gulf Coast generally occur about every 15 years, it was the early spring preceding the cold spell that left flowers beginning to blossom vulnerable to sudden weather change, agronomists say.

The breaking point for plants came this past weekend when the temperatures dipped below 25 degrees F. for three days.

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