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Freeze, hail were mercurial threats to the 2024 apple crop

By Bill Moss, Published: August 27, 2024

If you wanted to profile the good fortune and hard luck of the 2024 apple crop, you could do worse than the Creasman farm and the orchards grown by Jeff and Jerred Nix.

In the days before the 78^th annual North Carolina Apple Festival, growers were either lamenting the frost, freeze and hailstorms that wiped out hundreds of acres of apples or counting their blessings for having survived.

“Well, we didn’t have too much of a late spring freeze for once,” Colby Creasman Buchanan says. “So we have a big, beautiful crop of apples to sell at the festival, and we’re looking forward to it.”

The father-and-son Nix team had plenty to groan about.

“Ah hell, that’s part of it. What are you gonna do?” Jerred sums up when we visited his Flavor Full Farms on Ridge Road in the heart of the apple country. “We got about 40 (acres) out of 120 left. We’ve got a third of a crop.”

The breakdown: “Thirty acres was froze out” on Sugarloaf Mountain, he says. “Thirty-five acres was hail.” The casualties were “goldens, grannies, galas, Romes, reds, stamens, Fujis.”

The hail storm on May 8 wiped out two orchards closest to the Nixes’ homes in the Bearwallow community and many others in a narrow miles-long path.

“Between my place and Bub Hyder’s is where the line was,” Jerred says. “There’s three orchards between us and Liberty Church, and Bub’s like No. 4. Orchard No. 2 is where it started, and it went all the way to Lake Lake — Saint Paul Road, Grant Mountain, every orchard” — clear to the lake. “It may not be a quarter of the crop in Henderson County, but it ain’t far off. It’s at least 20 percent.”

The Nixes did the only thing they could do: Radical thinning via spray causes the hail-damaged apples to fall to the ground.

“Why you gonna take care of it?” Jerred says. “We still got to go in and spray to keep disease out of it for next year. You just don’t gotta do it as often as when you’ve got a crop out there.”

While weather damage is highly localized, market conditions that have suppressed prices hit universally. After the spring freeze of 2021 wiped out 80 percent of Henderson County’s apple crop, growers harvested a bumper crop in 2022.

“The market still has not absorbed the supply and stabilized,” Nix says. “2022 — the crop year was so large it took until December 2023 to sell the 2022 crop load.” In 2023, another freeze socked the crop here, wiping out half. But nationwide, growers harvested a bigger crop than 2022, Nix adds. “Then what good apples they do have in Washington, New York, Michigan in the C.A. (controlled atmosphere) coolers, they’re sending down here for nothing, trying to get the coolers empty for this year’s crop.”

And yet, challenges notwithstanding, the Nixes are better off than many growers. They’ve adapted and innovated. In the packinghouse “cold room,” automated equipment slices and packages apples for use in school lunchrooms across the state as part of the N.C. Agriculture Department’s Farm-to-School program. Although a funding drop has slowed the volume, the public schools’ purchase of Henderson County apples helps the Nixes’ Flavor Full Farm stay in the black.

‘Overall, yields are above average’

If the stark polarity between barely surviving and thriving looks startling, it’s actually fairly typical of a crop year. Elevation, wind, moisture and many other factors can mean that an orchard on Sugarloaf Mountain is wiped out while one in Dana is unscathed. As the May 8 hailstorm showed, a severe weather event feels apocalyptic on one slope while the sun shines pleasantly upon the next ridge. In seasons when Mother Nature wipes out of the crop, growers who fill bins with a full crop say the only reason they can think of is “God wanted me to have apples.”

“Overall yields are probably above average,” Terry Kelley, the cooperative extension director and an apple specialist, says of the 2024 edition. “Quality is looking pretty decent. We’ve got some frost rings on a few apples but not anything major. Internal quality is going to be really good. The weather’s been up and down. We’ve had dry weather, wet weather, cool weather, hot weather, but it’s all kind of evened out.”

The past two weeks of cool nights and sunny days have sweetened the apples up just before they’re plucked from the branch.

“We don’t like it too hot during the harvest time because it can hurt the colors,” Kelley says.

‘And then it’s time to sell’

At the Creasman farm, crews are ramping up this week for the single biggest retail sales stretch. The family operates one of the 14 apple stands on Main Street during the N.C. Apple Festival. Preparation started last winter. Colby Creasman Buchanan sounds like she’s done it all before when she races through the paces.

“You go through the whole growing season, right? We take care of the apples. We thin the apples. We summer-prune the trees,” she says. “We hand-thin the apples so that they’re not like golf ball size, so that they’re a nice-size eating apple. We tend to the orchard all year, which consists of mowing, of course, and then we harvest, and it’s still not over yet.

“They go in the big wooden apple bins and then they go into our packing house,” she continues. “Then we grade them and we pull out the small ones, or we pull out ones that are bumped up or bruised up, and then those go into the box for our cider apples. And it brushes them clean of any dirt or debris that might have gotten on them during harvest.

“And then they’re shined up and put in the box, and then comes the festival. All the setup: tables, tents, tent weights, the table cloths, the baskets. So then we unload them from the boxes and put them in the baskets. And then it’s time to sell.

“So it’s not just grow ‘em and pick them and put them in a box,” she says in closing. “There’s a little more to it.”