Fruit Chaos Is Coming

Summer, to me, is all about stone fruit: dark-purple plums, peaches you can smell from three feet away. But last summer, I struggled to find peaches at the farmers’ markets in New York City. A freak deep freeze in February had taken them out across New York State and other parts of the Northeast, buds shriveling on the branch as temperatures plummeted below zero and a brutally cold, dry wind swept through the region.

The loss was severe. One farmer estimated that the Hudson Valley lost 90 percent of its stone fruit. Evan Lentz, a faculty member in the plant-science department at the University of Connecticut, told me his state lost 50 to 75 percent. Another freeze in the second half of May damaged lots of other crops, including strawberries and blueberries. In New Hampshire, apple growers who went to bed with orchards full of pink blossoms awoke to petals turning brown. Georgia, the iconic peach state, lost some 90 percent of last year’s crop—a Georgia summer without peaches, an unfathomable thing. An unusually warm winter robbed the trees of the period of cold they need to bloom in the spring. The buds that did emerge were, like the ones in the Northeast, killed by a cold snap in the early spring.

Fruit trees evolved to live in more stable conditions; they’re exquisitely well adapted to the rhythm of a usual year. But instead of reliable seasons, they’re getting weather chaos: Springtime, already somewhat of a wild-card season, “is getting more and more erratic,” Theodore DeJong, a fruit-tree physiologist at UC Davis, told me. As a result, trees’ sense of seasonality is scrambled. And instead of reliable peaches and plums, we’re getting fruit chaos. It may not happen every year, but it’s happening more frequently.

[Read: What’s dangerous about an early spring]

Fruit trees, like people and all other living things, experience stress. And just as stress can build up over a human lifetime—the body keeps the score, as they say—a tree won’t forget the burden of each drought, extreme temperature swing, and pest infestation it survives. “They’re there year after year. They can accumulate stress year after year,” Lentz said. Each fruit, in turn, is shaped by the traumas its parent has endured.  

In New England, wild fluctuations in water availability have added to trees’ lifetime stress load. “We seem to bounce back and forth between a really wet year and a really dry year,” Lentz told me. “It’s not just warming. It’s these big swings, erratic weather patterns.” Such conditions, he said, can be terrifying for farmers, some of whom are working orchards that have been in their families for a century. “I’ve heard people say we don’t have any business growing peaches up here,” he told me.

Lately, Lentz has been trying to get farmers to consider uncommon fruit species more suited to handle the region’s changing climate. Aronia berry, also known as chokeberry, is one candidate. People could make jams or health products out of the astringent but antioxidant-rich fruit. He’s also looking into haskaps, which look like elongated blueberries, and he even has a few farmers trying out a kiwi species that grows well in Connecticut. Some summers might just have to taste different.

There is still hope for our familiar symbols of summer this year: It’s early in the season, and stone fruit could survive the spring. But dangers remain. DeJong, in California, told me his main worry now is rain. His state has been pummeled with extreme precipitation for months, leading to catastrophic flooding in places. Too much moisture exposes trees to rot and pests. It also messes with pollinators: The bees that pollinate crops such as almonds don’t like to fly in the rain. DeJong expects the almond crop in his part of California to suffer this year.

[Read: California’s climate has come unmoored]

In other parts of the country, the spring leaf-out has already begun—far ahead of schedule— thanks to a record-warm winter. This could be all right for fruit, so long as another cold snap doesn’t kill the buds. Extreme heat might be a danger across the country in the coming months. Fruits move through different developmental stages, like a person moving from infancy to adolescence. Heat drives the speed of that process, and unseasonable warmth can send development racing ahead of growth.

A peach, then, can move through its life cycle at warp speed—but if that happens too fast, it won’t accumulate the sugars it needs, so it will be tiny, and probably less sweet. DeJong, who has studied this phenomenon, recently got an email from a fruit expert in Australia, where summer has just ended and springtime temperatures were on average nearly 2 degrees Celsius above normal. “He said they had the lowest sugar content in peaches in Australia that they ever had this year,” DeJong told me. When I asked if DeJong thought climate change could result in a future where we’re eating crummier fruit, he wasn’t willing to rule it out. “I wouldn’t go out on a limb and say that’s a definite prediction,” he said. “But I would think it makes sense that that might occur.”

Nothing is more sublime than a good peach. But cosmic balance dictates that nothing is more deflating than a bad peach. And as climate change sows more seasonal chaos, we’re in danger of reaping more of its disappointing fruits.