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Maybe our weather has been so bad the past 2 seasons that anything is better than their sad loses.
What happened there past 2 seasons? I'm a weather buff (all over the Weather Forum) so we can easily check records.. It's been warmer past few years which made crops flourish. Some months wetter which sucked but overall gardens/farms have been much better than this year.
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USDA lowers Corn harvest estimates.. Wet June = less corn however more corn was planted compared to estimates. Corn prices expected to drop by 20 cents.
"national average per acre yield of corn is expected to remain at a record 165.3 bushels per acre, but the number of acres harvested will be about a half million less than expected last month at 83.8 million acres."
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Arnie Esterer considered giving up. He and his 45-year-old vineyard had survived the winters of 1994 and 2003, but now the vines were ravaged, reduced to blackened, bare stumps following the record-low temperatures that struck the eastern United States in early 2014. There clearly would be no crop this year, and the vines themselves were lifeless.
Until late April. That’s when shoots began to emerge from the ground,
A harsh winter can harm a vineyard in two ways: by killing the buds that form the previous year and carry this year’s crop, and, more seriously, by freezing the sap and shattering the vine from within. The extent of damage from the past winter is still uncertain. In northwest Michigan, growers on the Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas along Lake Michigan and Grand Traverse Bay (the latter froze in late February) are expecting to harvest a 2014 crop only 30 percent the size of a normal vintage.
Yet these areas have apparently escaped major vine kill, thanks to heavy snow cover that protected the vine roots and the sensitive area where the American rootstock is grafted to the European grape vine.
Few US wine-growing regions were hit harder than northeastern Ohio, along Lake Erie and the Grand River Valley northeast of Cleveland. After a mild December, temperatures plunged from 42 degrees to minus-19 over a period of 36 hours in early January, and stayed there for several hours. There was no snow cover to protect the vines. Subsequent cold spells magnified the damage.
“We didn’t mound up enough,” he says, referring to the practice of piling dirt around the vine trunk to protect the sensitive graft union from winter’s wrath
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I'm finding that (incuding home owners with Fig Trees around here) we were too used to the warm enough winters that it wasn't harsh enough to remember or listen to older generations and what they used to do to protect plants.
For instance... all Fig trees around this area sustained major damage.. My Grandfather used to cover and bury them in the ground ... Nodody did that after the 1980s and Fig trees always survived the winter. It was seen as too much work in many eyes.
But maybe the past generations learned to do it because of the harsh winters of the past.
Question is... are we prepared and are we entering times like that (Late 1800s). I think we need to make an effort to protect the plants more just in case we do get more of these harsh winters. Hope farmers are prepared. Cold kills, not warm.
Last year, vast percentages of wine grapes were wiped out by the bitter cold, says the Buffalo News. This winter, extreme temperatures of up to 30 below zero (Fahrenheit) killed off the buds in up to 60 percent of the hardier native Concord and Niagara grapes, according to Luke Haggerty, a specialist for the Lake Erie Regional Grape Program of the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Portland.
“It’s the coldest it’s been in this area for 80 years,” Haggerty said. “There’s a lot of anxiety as far as what to expect and what is coming.”
Research by Terry Bates, the director of the extension’s Lake Erie office, found a correlation exists between the amount and length of time there’s ice on Lake Erie and the calendar date when grape vines first bloom.
“If it stays cold like they’re predicting, it’ll be late and it’ll be a shorter growing season,” Bates said, not just for grapes, but fruits and vegetables too
Some smaller wineries say their crop was practically gutted in the deep-freeze.26 May 2015 – Vineyard owners in Prince Edward County and the Niagara region are assessing the damage from record-breaking cold late Friday night and Saturday morning.Farmers rented helicopters, turned on wind machines and set bales of hay on fire in an attempt to save what they could.
95 percent loss
Clark Tyler, manager at Harwood Estate Vineyards in Prince Edward County, estimates that a mere five per cent of grapes at his four-hectare vineyard survived the frost.“It’s just complete and utter devastation,” said Tyler, who added that some of his friends lost nearly everything.
A killing frost in late May has put a significant dent in local apple yields, according to Ken Martin, the operations manager at Martin's Family Fruit Farm in Waterloo, who says this fall's harvest will be half what is produced in a normal year.
The drop in temperatures happened in late May and while communities experienced record-breaking cold, fruit producers across much of the province scrambled to save their then still-nascent harvest.
Even though losses are bad, the year's harvest isn't a complete wash, according to Ken Martin.
"It's not as widespread this year as it was in 2012," Martin, the operations manager at Martin's Family Fruit Farm, said on Monday. "Some of our growers in the regions they are, they weren't hit as hard as we were. So it will be easier to obtain fruit this year than it was in 2012."
In 2012, Ontario apple farmers had a disastrous year after an early spring was followed by a sharp drop in temperatures where the frost nearly wiped out the province's apple crop, giving some farmers yields as low as 10 per cent.
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Ontario Apple Harvest cut in Half
