A recent crop report from Michigan State University Extension says swinging temps and frost may jeopardize this year’s cherry crop.
Temperatures in northwest Michigan have ranged from the mid-80s to below freezing in recent weeks.
Nikki Rothwell is with MSU Extension. She said those dramatic changes can damage blossoms and shorten the window for bees to pollinate.
“Bees like to fly when it's above 60 degrees and it's sunny,” Rothwell said. “It's just been really hard for those stars to align and to get that right temperature for bees.”
Plus, Rothwell said recent rainstorms and high winds made it hard for bees to pollinate. Even when bees have the perfect weather, Rothwell says the flowers have to be in the right stage of bloom to be receptive to pollination and form fruit.
“This year it seems really like a start and stop or kind of a mishmash of temperatures,” Rothwell said. “So, the bees are playing catch up or the flowers are moving through that, senescence process really quickly because it's so hot.”
With so many factors at play, Rothwell says seeing what Michigan’s cherry crop looks like is a waiting game.
In Antrim County, Juliette McAvoy with King Orchards says growers have been trying to protect their blooms from late-season frost with “frost fans”.
The fans mix up warm and cold air to protect buds and blossoms from being damaged. This year, McAvoy says the orchard had to use the fans 16 times.
“Last year we only ran it one night,” McAvoy said. “It's really tough on my brother and Dad and uncle who are up in the middle of the night turning on those fans and then refueling them every few hours.”
McAvoy said using the fans is expense, costing up to $400 per hour to run the fans across their orchard.
Luckily for King Orchards, frost struck before their trees were in full bloom.
“That’s a really good thing,” McAvoy said. “However, just the number of those cold events could really chip away at the final crop.”
The trees still have to go through pollination before they fruit set, so McAvoy said it will be some time before the orchard will know if their crop was impacted.
She says there’s more uncertainty with orchards further south whose flowers were further out of dormancy before the frost.
“We think that west central and southwest Michigan have a lot more damage, a lot more crop loss than we do here in northern Michigan,” McAvoy said. “That’s going to be hard for the Michigan cherry industry.”
McAvoy said the cherry producers have had a lot of challenges in the last 10 years. She said weather volatility is depleting crop sizes and input costs are rising.
“The returns to growers has been very low,” McAvoy said. “That's what we're hoping for, good pollination and then that the fruit actually sets.”
