How ‘extraordinarily dry’ conditions are affecting Nova Scotia’s apple, peach crops

The lack of significant rain in the Maritimes is affecting farmers’ crops.

The ongoing hot and dry conditions in the Maritimes are having a devastating impact on crops in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley.

Emily Lutz with the Nova Scotia Fruit Growers’ Association says July is typically a rainy month and August is drier, meaning they’re now starting with a huge rain deficit.

“Things are crunchy, they are crispy, and the trees are starting to show it,” she told CTV Morning Live’s Crystal Garrett.

She describes current conditions with apple crops as “pretty bad.”

“We’re lucky in perennial fruits, so apples and peaches, our trees are pretty big, they have pretty big root systems and so they’re able to draw water from very deep in the ground, which protects them through these long, long periods of dry,” she said.

“But that only goes so far. Really, at this point, there’s so little water that there’s that little to draw from in the ground, so we’re seeing the trees start to show stress, which can look like wilting leaves, the apples not sizing up appropriately, the peaches shriveling.”

While some growers use irrigation, not many apple growers do because the fruit is so hardy.

“It’s expensive to set up and generally it has to be done when you plant your orchards, so some of our orchards are 10, 15, 20 years old, so that irrigation often needs to be put in at the very beginning of that planting. As we’re seeing longer dry spells, I think more people are wishing they had irrigation,” Lutz said.

Peach growers typically use irrigation, though the crops are still looking smaller than normal right now as they ripen.

“Which can affect, of course, their returns when people want those nice, big juicy peaches. And if they’re not looking that great, it can affect the price, which then affects the farmers’ bottom line, which then has a ripple affect into the rest of the season,” said Lutz.

The peach season goes throughout August into early September in the valley, and then in late August they start seeing some early apple varieties.

“It is a long season, there’s lots of time hopefully to get some rain and to see things improve. And as you can imagine farmers are always checking the weather, so watching the weather forecast today it’s not surprising. I think people are feeling stressed, but also aware that it’s going to be another couple weeks before we may see some relief,” Lutz said.

The “point of no return” or the possibility of crops not bouncing back depends on where the apples are and the age of the trees.

“If they’re in light soil or heavy soil, and how the trees are currently performing. So if you’re in a dry area, your soil is light, the soil doesn’t retain water very well. Those trees are feeling the impacts much earlier and much more severely, but there’s some places where things are still going OK, so those crops might be fine, and those orchards may be OK,” said Lutz.

Growers are now starting to think about contingency plans to deal with the effects of climate change.

“There’s all kinds of factors that affect the fruit. There’s rain, so too much or too little, there’s temperature, we’ve had issues in climate change with late spring frost, which of course happened during the beautiful apple blossom season, but if we got a frost and those blossoms are impacted or they die we can lose the entire crop,” Lutz said.

A polar vortex in February 2023 took out the entire peach crop and impacted apple and peach trees across Annapolis Valley.

“There’s all kinds of stuff that we’re dealing with, but there’s all kinds of solutions that we’re looking at, so whether it’s irrigation or tile drainage for water issues, you can invest in large fans for frost mitigation, overhead irrigation that can sprinkle water on the trees to help impact those high and low temperatures. There’s even sun shade that can be like shade for apples, so that apples don’t get sunburned,” said Lutz.

She added that the dryness can also have impacts on the trees for years to come.

“There are lots of strategies and of course we work with our partners in government to help growers invest in those because a lot of them as you can imagine are pretty expensive when you’re growing fruit and when you’re dealing with such unpredictable crop returns and unpredictable weather patterns.”

Despite the dry weather, Nancy Weatherhead says the blueberries from her three-acre field in Upper Rawdon, N.S., continue to flourish.

“It’s still strong, they are not falling off the bushes, they are ripening right on cue,” she said.

“We have had probably somewhere around 700 or 800 pounds so far.”

Weatherhead says it’s the driest season she has ever seen.

“We have had so many different summers over the years and they are still doing well,” she said about her berries.

“I guess they are just meant to be, we can’t orchestrate anything anymore, everything is on God’s time.”

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Emma Convey.

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