Georgia Could Lose Up to 95 Percent of Its Peach Harvest Due to Wild Weather Swings

Tori Latham
·2 min read
4

Things aren’t so peachy-keen in Georgia this year.

The Peach State is having a hard time cultivating the stone fruit it’s become known for, The Washington Post reported over the weekend. Thanks to climate change, peach crops are struggling, with some experts estimating losses of 95 percent this year.

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“We’ve had some off crops, some bad years,” Lawton Pearson, a fifth-generation peach farmer, told the Post. “But we hadn’t had anything quite like this since 1955 … We just don’t have a peach crop.”

Pearson is in charge of 1,700 acres of peach trees, which are this year producing only about a tenth to a 20th of what they should have. And over at Dickey Farms, where the co-owner Lee Dickey has a 100,000-tree orchard, they’ve lost 80 to 90 percent of their peach crop.

The unfruitful year is in large part due to Georgia’s warming winters, with the first three months of 2023 being the hottest on record in the state. Peach trees, which enter dormancy after shedding their leaves in the fall, require a certain number of “chill hours”—time below 45 degrees Fahrenheit—for the buds to bloom correctly in the spring. As the winters get warmer, those chill hours are harder to come by, and then early-spring freezes can stop blooms that were able to develop in their tracks.

“Have that warm winter combined with a typical March freeze, and we’re not in a good spot to grow peaches anymore,” Pearson said.

Final numbers for total peach loss won’t be available until mid-August, Jeff Cook, a peach agent at the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension, told The Washington Post. But he thinks that a conservative estimate is 95 percent loss, with that reflected in higher prices for the fruit this year.

To compensate for the bad year, farmers like Pearson and Dickey will rely on crop insurance, as well as other produce like pecans. In the future, they might opt to plant peach varieties that require fewer chill hours, making them a bit more resilient to climate change. And locals, including the agricultural climatologist Pam Knox, remain optimistic about Georgia’s peach future.

“I don’t think we’re going to lose peaches,” she told the Post, “at least not in the short term.”

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