A Spring Frost Devastated Some NY Apple Crops, but Others Were Spared. What Made the Difference?

Sep 22, 2023

By Beth Adams

Evan Schutt plucks a Honeycrisp apple from a tree on his 50-acre farm on Plank Road in Penfield.

"You see this russeting?" Shutt asked, pointing out a discolored, gritty band around the middle. "No one's gonna want to bite into that."

The frost ring, as it's called, is the mark left on the apple from a frost on May 18. Even though the damage is only cosmetic, Schutt won't offer blemished apples for sale in Schutt's Apple Mill, the family business he took over eight years ago.

The harvest is still underway, but it appears as though half of Schutt's crop was affected by the late spring frost. In addition to the superficial damage seen on the Honeycrisp apples, the farm's Empire apples were almost completely wiped out this year.

Some of the apples with frost damage can be sold to make cider or apple juice, but he expects to get $60 per bin (800 pounds of apples), compared to the $600 or $700 that a bin of Honeycrisp eating apples could command.

In some ways, Schutt knows he is fortunate. Some New York apple growers lost 95% of their crop. According to early estimates, the losses average 20% statewide.

"We know of many farms in Central New York, in some of the highlands around the Hudson Valley, and a little bit further south of Lake Ontario ... more inland ...where they lost all of their crop, which is absolutely terrible," said Gregory Peck, associate professor of horticulture at Cornell University.

It all comes down to location, according to Peck. Orchards close to bodies of water are protected from frost events because the cooler air means the trees blossom later in the season. Proximity to water also mitigates large swings in temperature.

"On the morning of May 18," he said, "the orchards that were close to the lake, they just didn't drop down to as cold of a temperature as those orchards that were just a few miles further south of Lake Ontario."

Peck said losses from spring frosts will be more likely in future years, too, as climate change leads to warmer winters and earlier-blooming apple trees.

One method that growers can try to mitigate damage, he said, is planting a mix of apple varieties that are programmed to bloom at different times, so a single frost event doesn't destroy everything.

Elevation is another factor.

In Penfield, less than three-and-a-half miles from Schutt's Apple Mill, the apple orchard at Wickham Farms largely escaped frost damage this spring. That's because their apple trees sit on a hill.

"What happens is, the cold air actually runs like water, right down the hill, and the warm air stays. We believe that may have spared us," said Debbie Wickham, the farm's co-owner.

On a cool September morning last week, she was preparing to welcome customers who've been waiting for the new crop of Honeycrisp apples to be ready to pick.

This customer favorite makes up half of the farm's apple crop.

"We basically have more apples than we are currently able to sell. These trees are producing like wildfire," Wickham said, pointing to a wall of trees heavy with fruit.

Back at Schutt's Apple Mill, Evan Schutt said he'll get by this year by sourcing apples from other local growers and selling other products in his retail store.

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Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.