WOODBINE, Md. — A classic fall favorite activity may look a little different this year in Maryland and across the Mid-Atlantic region.
At Larriland Farm, run by second-generation co-owner Lynn Moore, the branches that should be heavily bearing fruit for apple picking. Instead, they are sparser than usual.
Moore points out that some trees only have a handful of apples, but should have more, around 40.
“It was a battle you couldn't fight. You weren’t going to win,” Moore said when asked about the April freeze. She recalls that the ground temperature was 19 degrees.
The Maryland Farm Bureau reports Maryland growers lost on average 67.5% of their crops. Moore believes her apple crop loss is between 70-80%.
Knowing farming is and always will be “the great gamble" at the whims of the weather patterns, Moore says they’ve tried to control what they can.
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“We’re growing a lot of different crops; that's our insurance policy. We figure that you're not gonna lose all your crops in the same year so that crop may be down, but this one's gonna be up so you're gonna come through,” she explains. “Well unfortunately, this year our plan isn't holding up.”
She encourages customers to check their website or call their Harvest Hotline at (410) 442-2605 ahead of time to see if it’s a good day to go picking. It may even change hour to hour, she says.
“It’s going to be spotty and erratic throughout the season,” she explained.
To say this year has been devastating to growers is just scratching the surface. There is a disaster designation for every single county in Maryland.
“Some counties got a double whammy where they had the freeze and also drought conditions,” Maryland Department of Agriculture Deputy Secretary Steve Connelly explained.
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“This is starting to feel like a new normal where we've got these very challenging years,” chief of staff Harrison Palmer added.
Connelly encourages farmers to look into insurance.
“The one thing I would encourage growers to do is to talk to a crop insurance agent. So that they can get a risk management policy to help protect them from future weather events,” he said.
The other option is the Noninsured Disaster-Assistance Program (NAP), which can be accessed through a local Farm Service Agency.
Palmer says they're working on strategic future planning and taking recent resiliency findings from the University of Maryland Harry R. Hughes for Agro-Ecology Center to heart.
“[The freeze] has certainly opened our eyes as an agency and where we can be providing different kinds of support to really step in for all of our growers across the state,” he said.
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