It will not be a good season for canning tomatoes. But it could be a great time to hone that recipe for apple pie.
As fall arrives, the vagaries of the farm business have rarely been more starkly illustrated than at harvest time this year, after extremely rainy weather early in the growing season resulted in small yields and blight for many vegetables and yet produced something of a bumper crop for apples.
For many facets of agriculture, the 2009 growing season can be described in three letters, “B-A-D,” said Chris Pawelski, of Pawelski”™s Farm in Goshen, which grows onions and squash. He added a fatalistic chuckle all too common in Hudson Valley agricultural circles this year and estimated his crop yield was down about 50 percent from a normal season”™s yield.
“This year is one of the worst years in the last 15, not just for onions but across the board,” said Pawelski. “Just a terrible year, too much rain for too long and no drying weather in between, especially in June.”
“Terrible” agreed Bart Colucci of Meadow View Farm in New Paltz, who also estimated crop production was “down between 40 and 50 percent. Everybody had the same problem.”
Even that old reliable crop hay was not so reliable this year, said Ken Kleinpeter, director of farming facilities at the Glynwood Center in Cold Spring. “We were effected in two ways,” said Kleinpeter, noting that vegetables on the center”™s organic CSA farm wilted beneath the one-two punch of cold wet weather and resultant blight.
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But he added another problem arose that will be felt in coming months at farms and horse stables around the region. “We were unable to make our first cutting of hay until well in to July and August, which means we missed the opportunity for a second cutting of hay,” said Kleinpeter. “That means we will have to buy more hay this winter, which is not something you want to do, but particularly this year when we will not be the only farm that had this problem.”
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The problem was the intensely wet early growing season period, particularly in June, where the weather station at the Smiley Research Center at Mohonk Preserve in Gardiner recorded 2.5 times the normal amount of rainfall, with almost 14 inches of rain falling in the month.
Pawelski said he has just finished harvesting the last of the 99 acres of onions and eight acres of squash he sowed, and said that the produce is smaller than in normal years and that the plants just couldn”™t continue producing as they normally do into September.
“Normally at this time in our fields you still have some onions standing and green but since the third week of August they”™ve been down and brown,” Pawelski said. He has been working the farm since 1982 and said, “I”™ve never seen that before. They just ran out of gas from lack of a good growing season.”
The wet weather causes blight, mold and other diseases, tends to keep the weather cooler than normal stymieing heat-loving plants like tomatoes and peppers and has an additional deleterious effect that is subtle but key: “Bees won”™t work in the rain,” said Colucci. That means that crops don”™t get pollinated and don”™t produce.
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“There was so much rain the pollen gets wet and bees can”™t make use of it, so they were
definitely restricted,” said Rod Dressel Sr., patriarch of the farm family in New Paltz. Dressel said that he expects “honey production will be down” but said that shortfall pales besides the problems in pumpkin patches.
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“Pumpkins are a disaster,” said Dressel, saying that there was a devastating amount of moisture in the soil when the pumpkins were being planted. The result was a bumper crop not of friendly orange orbs but of blight, mold and mildew. He said the problem was so bad he actually fears for next year”™s crop.
“We don”™t have enough land to rotate crops,” said Dressel. “So we just hope it (the blight) was airborne rather than coming in on the seeds. It”™s scary to think of plowing those vines back into the soil if they are contaminated with any blight or mildew, because it could possibly be there next year.”
Dressel said he will seek help from Cornell Cooperative Extension agricultural agents and said he expects other farmers will also raise the issue. “This will be a topic of discussion. We are hoping Cornell can scrutinize it this winter.”
Dressel also operates extensive orchards and here, he said, the harvest was relatively abundant, give or take a hail storm or two.
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“With the apples and peaches, we were able to have pretty good crop, the apples have good size, which is nice,” said Dressel. He said here again, “The lack of sunshine created problems” but nowhere near as severe as for vegetables. And he said in recent weeks the climate has been favorable for orchards.
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“The wet weather subsided in mid-August so we”™ve had some good weather; the temperature lately has been very good for the apple harvest,” said Dressel.
He noted that his farm was hit by a severe thunderstorm early in the summer but in another example of the vagaries inherent in agriculture, only a fraction of his orchards were struck by hail, leaving some apples blemished but edible and others alive but destined to become juice. Still, he said, the farm was lucky noting that some isolated examples of orchards whose crop were heavily damaged or destroyed by hail during the same string of storms that affected the area.
Michael J. Fargione, fruit extension educator for Cornell Cooperative Extension in Highland endorsed the idea of a surprisingly vibrant fruit crop in a wet season. Although he said that “significant crop loss occurred to some individual fruit farmers,” due to the hail storms in June, he said overall apples were rather abundant.
“The result of this rainy season this year has been a large crop of large fruit,” said Fargione. “We have a good quality crop.”
