Peaches Are Bountiful Again After Last Year's Poor Crop. But It's More Mixed in One Midwest State

Jul 12, 2024

By Will Bauer

Peach production for the larger orchards in deep southern Illinois appears to have bounced back after a rough year last summer — but it was a second down year in a row for a grower east of St. Louis.

“We’re really happy with where our peaches are at right now,” said Austin Flamm, who runs Flamm Orchards near Cobden about 100 miles southeast of St. Louis.

Last year, a cold spell in the winter knocked out all but 10% of their crop. It was the worst loss in 16 seasons for the fruit and vegetable farming family.

However, this year’s weather largely cooperated, and peach production at Flamm’s will stand at 100%. In fact, the crop was so plentiful Flamm and his team had to trim back some trees earlier this year.

“That’s a good problem because it means you have a big, full crop,” Flamm said.

Rendleman Orchards in Alto Pass, just a couple of miles from Flamm’s, had a similar year.

But at Eckert’s Inc. in Belleville, this year’s weather led to another down year — about 50% production, said Chris Eckert, the company’s president.

“The ultimate production is going to be about the same,” Eckert said. “I think the way it happened and the ultimate outcome is a little different.”

Subzero temperatures in mid-January and frost when the trees were blooming in March were the main culprits, he said.

“The concerning thing, from where I sit, is it's not frequently that we have two years in a row with this kind of outcome,” Eckert said. “One: That's hard to endure financially. And two: How much of this is a trend versus kind of circumstance — and are we going to be expecting more of this as time goes by?”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a crop insurance program for peaches, which Eckert said has been needed for the past two years.

“If we were to have two events of this magnitude without crop insurance, that’s kind of a business-ending event because the financial losses would be so catastrophic that you just couldn’t go on,” Eckert said.

Exactly which Illinois orchards felt the loss this peach season depends on geography, said Raghela Scavuzzo, executive director of the Illinois Specialty Growers Association.

“It's always a challenge because you're up against weather, and you never know what's going to happen,” Scavuzzo said.

Smaller orchards in Calhoun County, which sits between the Mississippi and Illinois rivers north of St. Louis, felt the worst of the cold. Some even had a total loss because of a late freeze, she said.

“There’s no guarantee in anything you do, but the farmers do it because they love feeding their community,” Scavuzzo said.

Consumers will notice prices return to normal in southern Illinois, Flamm said. With the short supply last summer, Flamm’s peaches increased about 30% in price, and Eckert’s jumped about 20%.

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Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”