Higher prices, shorter season: March freeze destroys South Carolina peach production.
Under a scorching South Carolina sun, it’s nearly impossible to think about frost.
That was months ago. Sixty degrees ago. A long gone bone-chill feeling. For produce sellers like Robert Broome and farm owners like Elliot Shuler, it’s hard to forget.
The untimely mid-March freeze is an inescapable reminder of a peach-growing season riddled with loss. South Carolina peach production was significantly squeezed when the stone fruits began to bud early thinking the mild winter would stay. It didn’t. Temperatures plummeted to freezing and the buds were killed.
It depends who you talk to, but losses for peach growers in South Carolina ranged from 70% to 90%. In Georgia, reports say losses were higher. Shuler, owner of Shuler Peach Company, estimated a 70% to 80% loss of his typical peach crop that spans 75 acres.
“I’ve had people calling me every day from Florida, Georgia... Tennessee and all up and down the East Coast,” Shuler said. “The people they normally get peaches from don’t have them.”
But the Holly Hill farm owner doesn’t have any bushels to spare. Shuler can’t supply to some of his normal customers and the family-owned business is running one less market. It’s an effect that’s rippled across South Carolina, the country’s second-largest peach producer and a vital industry that grosses tens of millions to the state and employs over a thousand people, according to the South Carolina Peach Council.
Last year, the state’s utilized peach production dropped 15%, with the production value decreasing by 7% to $98.6 million, the United States Department of Agriculture’s statistics service noted in a May 2023 report.
The scant supply has driven up bushel prices and will close out the season early.
For Broome, who owns The Yellow Peach Stand in Hardeeville, his normal selling season runs April through August. But for the past two years, it has narrowed to May through July. This summer, he estimates the supply will get him through early-to-mid July.
“If we can get them in South Carolina, we’ll be open. If we can’t get them in South Carolina, we close,” Broome said of his fruit and vegetable stand.
Shuler said his farm would run dry of the fruit about two weeks early, finishing up around the start of August.
Alongside a predicted early close to the season, peach prices were a gut punch at first.
At the beginning of the season, Broome, who sources peaches from a Barnwell farm, said a half-bushel of peaches was priced between $50 and $60. It’s nearly double the typical price. But the middle of the season, the cost leveled. At Shuler’s stand, a half-bushel runs $50. That’s between $10 and $20 higher than normal.
Anywhere someone goes, peach prices will be higher, Shuler said. For normal peach connoisseurs, they won’t be alarmed but for those who haven’t picked up half a bushel in a several years, they’ll be in for sticker-shock.
“Some people come and they feel like, ‘Man, you’re making a lot of money.’ We’re not gonna make any money,” Shuler said. “I can’t know every growers’ situation, but most growers are gonna have a hard time reaching any kind of profit level this year.”
This story was originally published June 25, 2023 at 12:47 PM.
