Vt. fruit growers brace for devastating losses from spring frost

WILLISTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Vermont is expected to lose millions of dollars from an early-season freeze. It comes as the governor this week asked federal agriculture officials for a disaster declaration to pave the way for anticipated financial assistance.

“There should be fruitlets at each of these spurs — there’s no fruit,” explained Terence Bradshaw, director of the UVM Horticulture Research and Education Center in South Burlington. He says May’s freeze is the worst he’s ever seen. “I wouldn’t say it’s as complete as we thought but it’s still, I would say, at the very serious to potentially catastrophic level, especially for some of the orchards that may have zero.”

The hard frost took a bite out of the crop at Adams Apple Orchard in Williston. “Unfortunately, we feel like we’ve lost well over 85% of our crop this year,” said owner Scott Adams.

And that means pick-your-own won’t be happening this fall. “It will be over $100,000 worth of income that we normally would get during the fall season,” Adams said.

And it’s not just trees. The grape vines at Shelburne Vineyards were also damaged. “It’s kind of like a slow-moving train wreck,” said the vineyard’s Eleanor Leger. She says they lost roughly 50% of their grapes. “It damages the vines. We lose fruit that fruit, then we can’t make it into wine, which means we don’t have wine about a year from now.”

Right now there’s very little relief for growers. Most are relying on crop insurance, which won’t cover anything close to their losses. “It’s not really designed for this region-wide loss that we saw, nor for farms that have either a value-added product where that $0.50 or $1 apple turns into a $10 bottle of cider,” Bradshaw said. He estimates Vermont’s apple industry alone will take a $10 million hit, and that grapes could tally around $1 million in losses. “To put that in perspective, the total Vermont apple industry is about $20 million depending upon what parts of cider and other components you include in there, so that’s a 50% loss in value. I would say in the grape industry, maybe a third.”

Leger says they will get by buying grapes from Canadian growers. “People who are going to really be impacted are the people who work in production. We’re not going to be able to use them as much and they depend on that for their families,” she said.

Adams says they’re relying on apples from orchards that weren’t hit as hard and events like food truck days to bring in foot traffic. “We hope that people will continue to come out in the fall season and support not only our business but other apple orchards that were affected as well,” he said.

Bradshaw says the orchards hit hardest are the ones on the edge of or outside the Champlain Valley.

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