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My hope is that there's a silver lining: farmers may finally accept that climate change is happening and start supporting policies to combat it. It's a long sho

My hope is that there's a silver lining: farmers may finally accept that climate change is happening and start supporting policies to combat it. It's a long shot but I'm somewhat hopeful. I live in the Willamette Valley, the heat wave has actually helped my fruit trees and blueberries but the eastern part of OR and WA are in pretty bad shape.

LatteLazy 5y ago
I hope you're right. That said, if the US government keeps bailing out farmers why change? Edit: Citation in case people people need one... https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/farmers-got-billions-from-taxpayers-in-2019-and-hardly-anyone-objected https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/fa... The USDA pumped 20bn in as recently as 2019. Partly for trade war and partly for flooding and other natural disasters. They didn't even need congressional approval, the USDA has a mandate to spend as it deems necessary.
- arbitrary_name 5y ago
  The bureau of reclamation had much to answer for here. Why are we growing stupid things like low value alfalfa in the desert? Why are we growing rice in the desert? Because we are giving the water away for almost nothing, that's why. Large farming operations have been parasites feeding off taxpayer subsidized water, irrigation and hydro power for the last century.
drdeadringer 5y ago
Apparently I am out of a loop: Farmers are denying climate change? If my livelihood depends on good climate, how can I not notice a good climate going bad? I'd like to understand. Is this something beyond wilful denial?
- blakesterz 5y ago
  Looks like that might be changing: 2020 Farm Groups Moving To Address Climate Change : NPR https://www.npr.org/2020/11/20/936603967/farmers-are-warming-up-to-the-fight-against-climate-change https://www.npr.org/2020/11/20/936603967/farmers-are-warming... Though apparently that wasn't the case 8 years ago: Why Don’t Farmers Believe in Climate Change? - Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/07/farmers-climate-change-denial/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/07/farmers-clim...
- deeviant 5y ago
  Farmers generally aren't climate change deniers in my experience, and I meet a lot of farmers on a regular basis as I work for one of the largest AG equipment suppliers in the world in r&d where we are constantly out testing new products or tech on farmers fields. They are practical, evidence based and extremely in-tune with anything that can affect their bottom line.
- williamtwild 5y ago
  I think the feeling is that farmers tend to be right leaning and conservative politically and are thought to be of the mindset to deny that climate change is real.
- tedivm 5y ago
  It's a combination of factors. If your farm depends on water, and it's a drought, it's hard to think of the long term when your may not financially survive the next few years. Droughts and other natural disasters have also occurred through all of human history, so scientists have only been able to say "this might be related" instead of "it was definitely caused by" climate change up until the last few years. There's also more than willful denial considering the amount of propaganda that tries to claim that climate change either isn't real or is grossly exaggerated (there are even efforts to claim that it will be beneficial). The channels that tend to push this also tend to be very popular in rural areas. This isn't even just a climate change things- the same groups of people claiming there's a labor shortage also try to deport anyone who doesn't look like them.
- zwieback 5y ago
  I did a little more Googling and it's, of course, more nuanced than I thought. Even in Iowa, which is probably more conservative than most places, the attitudes are shifting: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/iowa-farm-and-rural-life-poll-shows-farmers-beliefs-climate-change-are-shifting https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/iowa-farm-and-rural-l... I think a big difference is the belief of the cause of climate change, a large percentage of farmers believes it's mostly or partly due to natural variations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- newaccount2021 5y ago
  Its a common HN low-effort trope in two parts: 1) Assume there is a huge body of activist climate-deniers controlling society 2) The moment we all merely believe the same thing, the climate will begin rapidly healing itself HN does not believe in actual sacrifice (since the typical HN reader is in the top 1% of polluters), only ideological conformity
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  I think the parent — like most people (including myself until recently) — has a poor understanding of the professional makeup of rural communities. There was never a period in American history where most rural people were farmers. That was a Jeffersonian daydream. In the colonial/early-American period, farms consisted of landowners, and a mix of slaves and poorly-paid employees. When slavery ended and the industrial revolution came along, tractors took over most of the work and the employees left for factories; the number of landowners (what we now call "farmers") is not very different now than in 1800. Here's a census report on the actual careers of small-town America. Lot of community service (education, health care), a little manufacturing and retail… about what one might expect, really. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/blogs/2016/12/beyond-the-farm/fig01-type-industry.jpg https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/blogs/201... … so getting back to the point of climate change… on the one hand, since farmers don't make up the majority of rural communities, their opinions on climate change don't mean much politically. On the other hand, they do have a very direct and personal effect on the climate w/r/t soil practices (erosion, pesticides, etc), and there are some positive signs on that front.
- dfxm12 5y ago
  Corporate farming (or big ag) outnumbers family farms to the point where family farmers are politically insignificant compared to corporate farming. With that in mind, "their" (i.e., corporate farms) livelihoods depend more on government subsidies than good climate. I don't think you can generalize how family farmers feel about climate change, or even if they're single issue voters that may or may not care about something else more. Corporate farms are big business though, and big business tends to vote conservative in the US, and conservatives in the US tend to not take action to fix climate change. These two things may be related, too.
- supertrope 5y ago
  6:23 https://youtu.be/ig_YIEYk81U https://youtu.be/ig_YIEYk81U PBS Frontline, Betting on Trump: Water (2017)
acwan93 5y ago
What's your take on the Willamette Valley becoming the next Napa? I've heard this being discussed as climate change and wildfires become more apparent in California.
- zwieback 5y ago
  I've heard this too but don't know a lot about wine. What I have noticed in my 26 years here is that there are more and more drinkable reds growing in the valley, you may not see it so much in the supermarkets but when you go on wine tours it seems like there's more selection of wines that need warmer weather so it does seem like a real possibility. The land is pretty densely farmed, though, so you'd either have to log some hills or displace other crops, not that that would be a problem if it promises to be lucrative.
  - iNane9000 5y ago
    Most wine today is fake and terroir isn’t as important as micro-aeration or various additives like oak chips or mega purple.
    - twiddling 5y ago
      Since I hadn't heard about mega-purple: https://www.winespectator.com/articles/what-is-mega-purple-46549 https://www.winespectator.com/articles/what-is-mega-purple-4...
- harlanlewis 5y ago
  Last year, when SF was posting photos of the orange sky I was driving up I5 in the Willamette Valley at 11am with my brights on because smoke had turned day to night. Last year 4.4 million[1] acres burned in CA (~4% of the state), and 1.2 million[2] in OR (~2% of the state). These are huge numbers. Similar to CA, it's not just the acreage significantly increasing in recent years but also intensity and damage. The Almeda Drive Fire destroyed over 2,000 structures between Ashland and Medford, in highly accessible terrain with firefighting resources nearby. Right now, the Bootleg Fire in Oregon is over 150,000 acres with 0% containment [3], putting it within the top 20 largest fires in state history at present and likely to grow. From my layman's perspective, it seems that the brief window when CA's ideal climate moves slightly north has already come and gone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_wildfires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_wildfires [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_wildfires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_wildfires [3] https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7609/ https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7609/
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Just because they vote red doesn't mean they're onboard with literally everything on that platform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity People who's livelihood depends on the climate are generally going to have opinions about the climate that track the evidence and scientific consensus.
- throwaway1777 5y ago
  This pretty much. Farmers don’t usually deny climate change but they also want their guns and independence.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  But climate change is the single most important issue of our time. Even if I disagreed with a candidate on everything else, I'd still vote for them if their opponent was denying the existence of climate change. What is it going to take for people to realize how serious this is?
  - blix 5y ago
    If an abstract threat with the primary impacts expected to appear in dozens of years, if not longer, is your primary concern, you have it pretty good. Not everyone has it so good. The way to get people to think about the long term is to understand which short term concerns are blocking the path.
  - CheezeIt 5y ago
    The reason is, you’re wrong, it’s not the most important issue. Because there are other more important issues. There are more important long term issues. There are even some more important environmental issues, in terms of harm and our ability to engage productively with them. And your opinion about what to do about climate change is surely a thoughtless, harmful, uncreative regurgitation.
  - supertrope 5y ago
    When the short term immediate consequences of climate change are greater than the immediate benefits of combustion energy. So never. Look at the gilet jaunes protests. No one wants to lose their job or limit the GDP growth of their country to protect the environment for their great grandkids or great great grandkids.
francisofascii 5y ago
Biden recently said no to raising the gas tax. So even if they vote blue, it doesn't seem to matter unfortunately.
- api 5y ago
  Gas taxes are extremely regressive. All consumption taxes for non-luxury goods are regressive, and lower income people typically own old cars with worse gas mileage and/or use trucks to work blue collar jobs.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Poorer people use much less fuel than wealthier people. Gas taxes are not regressive. Poisoning the atmosphere is regressive.
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      > Poorer people use much less fuel than wealthier people. Gas taxes are not regressive. Poisoning the atmosphere is regressive. That isn't always true. At least in my city, poor people have to drive to work, richer people often have the luxury of riding their bike or taking the corporate bus in (because they live closer to work (or even public transit) and/or their company provides them with perks that reduce their need for driving).
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        I guess you'll need to show some data because in every American city I've studied income is positively and strongly correlated with private vehicle travel. Poor people are not obligate drivers; they disproportionately walk and bike and take the bus. A typical result that I just drew from my PDF library says "higher income, higher educational attainment, and smaller household sizes tend to be associated with a higher probability of commuting by private vehicle and a lower probability of commuting by transit or active modes."
        5y ago
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
A lot of people who don't "accept that climate change is happening" actually do when you talk to them and understand where they're coming from. What they often don't like are the proposed solutions to it. Which makes sense when you consider that those proposed solutions often involve completely upending their life.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  using your brain, don't you think vague, exaggerated and detail-free statements like "completely upending your life" are part of utterly ordinary mental resistance-patterns? In other words, actively defeating consideration of detail and alternatives
  - jeffreyrogers 5y ago
    If you are a farmer your entire life revolves around planting your crops with heavy machinery[0], fertilizing[1] your crops with heavy machinery, harvesting your crops with heavy machinery, and then transporting your crops to storage/processing by truck, rail, or barge. All of which require massive fossil fuel inputs. So I would say "completely upending their life" is a fair assessment. Edit: Would love to hear your detailed alternatives though. [0]: Requires lots of fuel. [1]: Fertilizer is a produced from natural gas or mined using heavy machinery.
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      But if all of your competition has the exact same impacts, I don’t understand the problem. Unless there is some other way to get food besides farming?
      - jeffreyrogers 5y ago
        That's sort of my point. Any change on the scale required to affect climate change would require a massive upheaval of the industry so it isn't going to happen anytime soon.
giantrobot 5y ago
Farmers have known about climate change and accepted it for years [0]. What's missing is the acceptance that it's anthropogenic. So instead of supporting any sort of helpful policies most farmers (which are really just huge agricultural concerns) just bitch about water rights, "city folk", and stick their hands out for government subsidies. I don't expect much self reflection from that group. They finance state and federal representatives to double down on subsidies rather than any meaningful changes. [0] https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm
crisdux 5y ago
I don't think this comment understands the reality of how great the US's food producing abilities are. US producers could add more new land to its agriculture output than all other countries combined. All that new land is in areas that already have infrastructure for that land to be productive. US farms continue to increase the productivity of their land. In some locations in the Midwest, farmers are able to increase their crop cycles. The effects of climate change are probably a net gain for US agriculture, I don't expect the fight to come from them.
nakodari 5y ago
How did the heat wave benefit your fruit trees?
- zwieback 5y ago
  Maybe not those two days of crazy heat but overall our spring and early summer was much warmer and drier. Normally I lose most of my cherries because of cold or moisture during or right after the blossom but this year I had a bumper crop on both my cherry trees and my plums are also doing great. Apples and pears are generally always great, this year I had some fruit drop after the two 100+ days but still going to be a good harvest.

LatteLazy 5y ago

I hope you're right. That said, if the US government keeps bailing out farmers why change? Edit: Citation in case people people need one... https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/farmers-got-billions-from-taxpayers-in-2019-and-hardly-anyone-objected https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/fa... The USDA pumped 20bn in as recently as 2019. Partly for trade war and partly for flooding and other natural disasters. They didn't even need congressional approval, the USDA has a mandate to spend as it deems necessary.

arbitrary_name 5y ago
The bureau of reclamation had much to answer for here. Why are we growing stupid things like low value alfalfa in the desert? Why are we growing rice in the desert? Because we are giving the water away for almost nothing, that's why. Large farming operations have been parasites feeding off taxpayer subsidized water, irrigation and hydro power for the last century.

drdeadringer 5y ago

Apparently I am out of a loop: Farmers are denying climate change? If my livelihood depends on good climate, how can I not notice a good climate going bad? I'd like to understand. Is this something beyond wilful denial?

blakesterz 5y ago
Looks like that might be changing: 2020 Farm Groups Moving To Address Climate Change : NPR https://www.npr.org/2020/11/20/936603967/farmers-are-warming-up-to-the-fight-against-climate-change https://www.npr.org/2020/11/20/936603967/farmers-are-warming... Though apparently that wasn't the case 8 years ago: Why Don’t Farmers Believe in Climate Change? - Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/07/farmers-climate-change-denial/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/07/farmers-clim...
deeviant 5y ago
Farmers generally aren't climate change deniers in my experience, and I meet a lot of farmers on a regular basis as I work for one of the largest AG equipment suppliers in the world in r&d where we are constantly out testing new products or tech on farmers fields. They are practical, evidence based and extremely in-tune with anything that can affect their bottom line.
williamtwild 5y ago
I think the feeling is that farmers tend to be right leaning and conservative politically and are thought to be of the mindset to deny that climate change is real.
tedivm 5y ago
It's a combination of factors. If your farm depends on water, and it's a drought, it's hard to think of the long term when your may not financially survive the next few years. Droughts and other natural disasters have also occurred through all of human history, so scientists have only been able to say "this might be related" instead of "it was definitely caused by" climate change up until the last few years. There's also more than willful denial considering the amount of propaganda that tries to claim that climate change either isn't real or is grossly exaggerated (there are even efforts to claim that it will be beneficial). The channels that tend to push this also tend to be very popular in rural areas. This isn't even just a climate change things- the same groups of people claiming there's a labor shortage also try to deport anyone who doesn't look like them.
zwieback 5y ago
I did a little more Googling and it's, of course, more nuanced than I thought. Even in Iowa, which is probably more conservative than most places, the attitudes are shifting: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/iowa-farm-and-rural-life-poll-shows-farmers-beliefs-climate-change-are-shifting https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/iowa-farm-and-rural-l... I think a big difference is the belief of the cause of climate change, a large percentage of farmers believes it's mostly or partly due to natural variations.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
newaccount2021 5y ago
Its a common HN low-effort trope in two parts: 1) Assume there is a huge body of activist climate-deniers controlling society 2) The moment we all merely believe the same thing, the climate will begin rapidly healing itself HN does not believe in actual sacrifice (since the typical HN reader is in the top 1% of polluters), only ideological conformity
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
I think the parent — like most people (including myself until recently) — has a poor understanding of the professional makeup of rural communities. There was never a period in American history where most rural people were farmers. That was a Jeffersonian daydream. In the colonial/early-American period, farms consisted of landowners, and a mix of slaves and poorly-paid employees. When slavery ended and the industrial revolution came along, tractors took over most of the work and the employees left for factories; the number of landowners (what we now call "farmers") is not very different now than in 1800. Here's a census report on the actual careers of small-town America. Lot of community service (education, health care), a little manufacturing and retail… about what one might expect, really. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/blogs/2016/12/beyond-the-farm/fig01-type-industry.jpg https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/blogs/201... … so getting back to the point of climate change… on the one hand, since farmers don't make up the majority of rural communities, their opinions on climate change don't mean much politically. On the other hand, they do have a very direct and personal effect on the climate w/r/t soil practices (erosion, pesticides, etc), and there are some positive signs on that front.
dfxm12 5y ago
Corporate farming (or big ag) outnumbers family farms to the point where family farmers are politically insignificant compared to corporate farming. With that in mind, "their" (i.e., corporate farms) livelihoods depend more on government subsidies than good climate. I don't think you can generalize how family farmers feel about climate change, or even if they're single issue voters that may or may not care about something else more. Corporate farms are big business though, and big business tends to vote conservative in the US, and conservatives in the US tend to not take action to fix climate change. These two things may be related, too.
supertrope 5y ago
6:23 https://youtu.be/ig_YIEYk81U https://youtu.be/ig_YIEYk81U PBS Frontline, Betting on Trump: Water (2017)

acwan93 5y ago

What's your take on the Willamette Valley becoming the next Napa? I've heard this being discussed as climate change and wildfires become more apparent in California.

zwieback 5y ago
I've heard this too but don't know a lot about wine. What I have noticed in my 26 years here is that there are more and more drinkable reds growing in the valley, you may not see it so much in the supermarkets but when you go on wine tours it seems like there's more selection of wines that need warmer weather so it does seem like a real possibility. The land is pretty densely farmed, though, so you'd either have to log some hills or displace other crops, not that that would be a problem if it promises to be lucrative.
- iNane9000 5y ago
  Most wine today is fake and terroir isn’t as important as micro-aeration or various additives like oak chips or mega purple.
  - twiddling 5y ago
    Since I hadn't heard about mega-purple: https://www.winespectator.com/articles/what-is-mega-purple-46549 https://www.winespectator.com/articles/what-is-mega-purple-4...
harlanlewis 5y ago
Last year, when SF was posting photos of the orange sky I was driving up I5 in the Willamette Valley at 11am with my brights on because smoke had turned day to night. Last year 4.4 million[1] acres burned in CA (~4% of the state), and 1.2 million[2] in OR (~2% of the state). These are huge numbers. Similar to CA, it's not just the acreage significantly increasing in recent years but also intensity and damage. The Almeda Drive Fire destroyed over 2,000 structures between Ashland and Medford, in highly accessible terrain with firefighting resources nearby. Right now, the Bootleg Fire in Oregon is over 150,000 acres with 0% containment [3], putting it within the top 20 largest fires in state history at present and likely to grow. From my layman's perspective, it seems that the brief window when CA's ideal climate moves slightly north has already come and gone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_wildfires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_wildfires [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_wildfires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_wildfires [3] https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7609/ https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7609/

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Just because they vote red doesn't mean they're onboard with literally everything on that platform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity People who's livelihood depends on the climate are generally going to have opinions about the climate that track the evidence and scientific consensus.

throwaway1777 5y ago
This pretty much. Farmers don’t usually deny climate change but they also want their guns and independence.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
But climate change is the single most important issue of our time. Even if I disagreed with a candidate on everything else, I'd still vote for them if their opponent was denying the existence of climate change. What is it going to take for people to realize how serious this is?
- blix 5y ago
  If an abstract threat with the primary impacts expected to appear in dozens of years, if not longer, is your primary concern, you have it pretty good. Not everyone has it so good. The way to get people to think about the long term is to understand which short term concerns are blocking the path.
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  The reason is, you’re wrong, it’s not the most important issue. Because there are other more important issues. There are more important long term issues. There are even some more important environmental issues, in terms of harm and our ability to engage productively with them. And your opinion about what to do about climate change is surely a thoughtless, harmful, uncreative regurgitation.
- supertrope 5y ago
  When the short term immediate consequences of climate change are greater than the immediate benefits of combustion energy. So never. Look at the gilet jaunes protests. No one wants to lose their job or limit the GDP growth of their country to protect the environment for their great grandkids or great great grandkids.

francisofascii 5y ago

Biden recently said no to raising the gas tax. So even if they vote blue, it doesn't seem to matter unfortunately.

api 5y ago
Gas taxes are extremely regressive. All consumption taxes for non-luxury goods are regressive, and lower income people typically own old cars with worse gas mileage and/or use trucks to work blue collar jobs.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Poorer people use much less fuel than wealthier people. Gas taxes are not regressive. Poisoning the atmosphere is regressive.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > Poorer people use much less fuel than wealthier people. Gas taxes are not regressive. Poisoning the atmosphere is regressive. That isn't always true. At least in my city, poor people have to drive to work, richer people often have the luxury of riding their bike or taking the corporate bus in (because they live closer to work (or even public transit) and/or their company provides them with perks that reduce their need for driving).
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      I guess you'll need to show some data because in every American city I've studied income is positively and strongly correlated with private vehicle travel. Poor people are not obligate drivers; they disproportionately walk and bike and take the bus. A typical result that I just drew from my PDF library says "higher income, higher educational attainment, and smaller household sizes tend to be associated with a higher probability of commuting by private vehicle and a lower probability of commuting by transit or active modes."
      - 5y ago

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

A lot of people who don't "accept that climate change is happening" actually do when you talk to them and understand where they're coming from. What they often don't like are the proposed solutions to it. Which makes sense when you consider that those proposed solutions often involve completely upending their life.

mistrial9 5y ago
using your brain, don't you think vague, exaggerated and detail-free statements like "completely upending your life" are part of utterly ordinary mental resistance-patterns? In other words, actively defeating consideration of detail and alternatives
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  If you are a farmer your entire life revolves around planting your crops with heavy machinery[0], fertilizing[1] your crops with heavy machinery, harvesting your crops with heavy machinery, and then transporting your crops to storage/processing by truck, rail, or barge. All of which require massive fossil fuel inputs. So I would say "completely upending their life" is a fair assessment. Edit: Would love to hear your detailed alternatives though. [0]: Requires lots of fuel. [1]: Fertilizer is a produced from natural gas or mined using heavy machinery.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    But if all of your competition has the exact same impacts, I don’t understand the problem. Unless there is some other way to get food besides farming?
    - jeffreyrogers 5y ago
      That's sort of my point. Any change on the scale required to affect climate change would require a massive upheaval of the industry so it isn't going to happen anytime soon.

giantrobot 5y ago

Farmers have known about climate change and accepted it for years [0]. What's missing is the acceptance that it's anthropogenic. So instead of supporting any sort of helpful policies most farmers (which are really just huge agricultural concerns) just bitch about water rights, "city folk", and stick their hands out for government subsidies. I don't expect much self reflection from that group. They finance state and federal representatives to double down on subsidies rather than any meaningful changes. [0] https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm

crisdux 5y ago

I don't think this comment understands the reality of how great the US's food producing abilities are. US producers could add more new land to its agriculture output than all other countries combined. All that new land is in areas that already have infrastructure for that land to be productive. US farms continue to increase the productivity of their land. In some locations in the Midwest, farmers are able to increase their crop cycles. The effects of climate change are probably a net gain for US agriculture, I don't expect the fight to come from them.

nakodari 5y ago

How did the heat wave benefit your fruit trees?

zwieback 5y ago
Maybe not those two days of crazy heat but overall our spring and early summer was much warmer and drier. Normally I lose most of my cherries because of cold or moisture during or right after the blossom but this year I had a bumper crop on both my cherry trees and my plums are also doing great. Apples and pears are generally always great, this year I had some fruit drop after the two 100+ days but still going to be a good harvest.