After an unusually devastating winter season, Creston farmers are seeing the effects on their fruit trees.
Soft fruits, such as apricots, cherries, and peaches, all suffered from an intense change in temperature during the winter.
Local farmer, Frank Wloka, says their production this year has been severely impacted.
“We basically have had absolutely no soft fruit. Our cherry crop is normally around 40,000 pounds. We’ve picked 680 pounds,” explained Wloka.
“There were 12 apricots in the whole orchard, and the crows got four of them. So, my wife got the other eight.”
Besides the fruit production, the winter also damaged the trees themselves.
“Many of the trees, like nectarines and apricots, likely will not survive. We’ll have to remove them. All the Japanese variety plum trees have died as well. So we won’t have any going into the future.”
What made this particular winter so damaging to soft fruit was the fluctuation in temperature.
In December, Wloka says unusually warm temperatures tricked the trees into thinking Creston had an early spring.
“So, they started to push sap. Then, in January, we had three days that plummeted to about minus 28, 29. The problem is you end up with sap, which is a liquid. When it plummets that far down, there’s rupturing in the cell structure.”
The more rupturing there is, the more damage to the tree.
Wloka says most of the peach trees looked like they were going to die, but they pushed out new branches which is promising for the future.
Peach trees can produce fruit after one year. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for other trees.
The poor fruit crop this year will have far-reaching consequences, says Wloka.
“What I estimated at the beginning of March was approximately a $60 million hit to Creston. And that’s to all the businesses. That’s tractor dealers, truck dealers, restaurants, and grocery stores. You don’t have the thousand pickers in the valley picking cherries, going to the grocery stores every couple of days for groceries.”
For Wloka himself, he says they employed 56 people this year, but now they employ below 30.
“It’s not just an impact for our business. The impact is to the local economy as well.”
While Wloka has seen losses before, something as drastic as this is unusual.
“It’s very unusual to have that depth of this loss. Unfortunately, this is the reality of the weather swings and changes. The adaption to climate change is something we haven’t really become used to.”
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