Strawberry and apples are among the crops impacted by sub-zero temperatures
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
Farmers in Atlantic Canada are concerned that a recent stretch of cold weather has resulted in extensive damage to their crops.
Producers in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island experienced temperatures at or below zero earlier in the week.
Farmers were forced to take unique approaches to protect their crops from further damage.
Gary Stephens, who produces squash and other vegetables near Keswick Ridge, N.B., was “driving up and down with the heaters going with the propane flames out, driving up and down our fields between the rows trying to protect as many plants as we could from damage,” he told Global News on Tuesday.
The frost destroyed about $10,000 worth of squash on Stephens’s farm, Global News reported.
In Nova Scotia, growers are worried about their apple orchards.
The farm gate value of Nova Scotia’s annual apple crop is about $13 million, the province’s agriculture ministry said.
But the recent frost wiped out almost any possible income for at least one apple farmer.
The frost “has taken all my earning away for the 2019 year,” Lloyd Dyck, an apple grower from Waterville, N.S., told Global News yesterday. “We’re trying not to think about it, but at the same time we still have to take care of the trees so that there’s going to be a crop, a potential crop, next year.”
And in Prince Edward Island, strawberry producers are assessing the damage on their crops.
One farmer estimates the frost destroyed about a third of his potential strawberry harvest.
“It could be better than that, or it could be worse, but right now from what we’re seeing that’s kind of a number that we’re pretty concerned about,” Matt Compton, president of the P.E.I. Strawberry Growers Association, told CBC yesterday.
Compton grows about 20 acres of strawberries, as well as 35 acres of vegetables on his farm in Summerside, P.E.I.
The frost also destroyed pumpkins and yellow beans, he told CBC.
Damaged strawberry crop on Matt Compton's farm.
Natalia Goodwin/CBC photo