BYRON — First, the winter was too warm. Now, it may be too cold.
Peach growers could be harvesting the perils of their trade as the fickle weather threatens some of their crop.
Duke Lane Jr.’s predicament illustrates the situation.
On the one hand, he was worried early last week that the winter had been so warm that it might hurt part of his peach crop this spring and summer. That’s because peach trees need a sufficient cold period to rest so they can produce a good crop later.
But then later in the week, weather forecasters warned that temperatures could hit the low 20s this weekend at his 5,500-acre farm in the peach-growing region south of Macon, possibly threatening another part of his crop.
“We’re in the hands of Mother Nature,” Lane said last week as he examined the flower buds — which were swelling and turning pink — in one of his groves of peach trees. An early blooming variety, the trees were also about a month ahead of schedule because of the recent weeks of abnormally warm weather. But their flower buds were now vulnerable to this weekend’s potential hard freeze.
“We would be picking this peach in 90 days — if nothing happens,” said Lane, president of Lane Southern Orchards in Fort Valley, one of the state’s largest peach producers.
Last week, growers and industry experts weren’t expecting heavy crop losses from either the predicted freeze or the too-warm winter.
The freezing temperatures that were forecast for today will likely kill off some of this year’s peach crop, but the extent of the damage depends on a lot of factors and is hard to predict, said one expert.
The key factors are how cold it gets, for how long, and how far along trees are in the blooming cycle. Prolonged temperatures at 25 degrees will kill about 10 percent of buds close to blooming, but roughly 90 percent at 15 degrees, according to the Washington State University Extension Service.
Weather forecasters predicted last week that lows would hit 22 degrees Saturday and 20 degrees today in the peach-growing region around Byron.
“Likely, we will have some damage, but not enough to reduce the crop too much,” said Dick Okie, the semi-retired peach breeder at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Southeast Fruit & Tree Nut Research Lab in Byron.
Still, farmers are facing potential crop losses after two years of bumper harvests due to Goldilocks-like growing conditions — cold winters and warm springs that were neither too cold nor hot at the wrong times.
“The last two years were real good growing years,” said Al Pearson, co-owner of Pearson Farm, another large peach producer near Fort Valley. Along with sufficient cold, he said, “we would like for December, January and February to be wet and sloppy. That gives the peaches a chance to recharge.”
But through last week, by one measure, this has been the warmest winter since 1957, according to the National Weather Service.
Pearson said the extended warm weather has revved up his early-blooming trees, about 30 percent of his orchard. “They’re going to have a window of [freeze] vulnerability that’s real wide from now to Easter,” he said. But he thinks this weekend’s expected freeze won’t do much damage.
If crop losses turn out to be worse than expected, however, it will hurt not only farmers, their employees and communities in the peach-growing regions in Middle and South Georgia, but potentially drive up prices consumers pay at the supermarket.
Georgia was the nation’s fifth-largest peach producer in 2010 (latest available data), with a harvest of 38,500 tons valued at $31.5 million, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Peach growers are worried because this winter’s odd combination of long warm spells and possible late freezes is testing the limits of their portfolio-like approach to planting peach trees.
In order to extend their harvest season from May to as late as September, and to hedge their weather-related risks, peach farmers plant dozens of varieties of peach trees with varying sensitivities to cold.
Traditionally, growers and horticulturists measure this sensitivity in so-called “chill hours.” That is the number of hours below 45 degrees that a tree variety needs to accumulate during the winter in order to have a normal dormancy period and produce a healthy crop the next spring and summer.
Georgia growers typically plant some early flowering varieties that need as little as 650 chill hours and some later-blooming types that need up to 950 hours. The bulk of Georgia growers’ trees are in the 650 to 850 range.
Because of weeks of warm weather, some groves of the warmer-blooded trees are almost ready to bloom — a month early — and increasingly vulnerable to a freeze.
But the trees that need more chill hours and are not ready to bloom yet may benefit from the cold snap.
“Another week of the cool spell will get us into better shape on the higher chill peaches that need 950 or more chill hours,” said Okie.
Indeed, until last week, the bigger worry was the warm winter. During a meeting of the region’s peach growers last week, Okie tried to reassure growers that most peach tree varieties had accumulated or would soon tally sufficient “chill units” under a newer tracking method that he believes is more accurate.
By early last week in Byron, trackers had clocked 672 chill hours under the old system but 812 chill units under the new one.
“We may be all right on all of [the tree varieties],” Okie said last week at the meeting in the USDA’s research station in Byron, which studies fruit and pecan trees.
But that was before the more severe cold weather was predicted.
Harris Sledge, who has farmed 100 acres of peaches near Byron for 35 years, was worried that a freeze could hurt some of his orchard that is close to blooming.
“There’s not a whole lot you can do about frost,” he said.
“In 2007, we bloomed and we had peaches as big as your thumb, and we had a frost on Easter Sunday. We lost a lot of peaches,” he recalled. “We’re still not out of the woods.”
Over on the peach and pecan operation that he manages in partnership with a privately owned Florida citrus farm, Duke Lane Jr. recalled the 2007 freeze as he watched a crew pruning peach trees.
Unlike now, the peach trees then had golf ball-sized fruit by the time the late freeze hit in April, he said.
“We ended up with about 10 percent of a crop. It was devastating,” he said.
Although the company carries crop insurance that would make up much of a loss, he added, “we’ve got our fingers crossed that we won’t have any more hard freezes.”
