Fall in the Midwest calls for cider, donuts and apple-picking and the Chicago region’s many well-loved orchards offer a chance to connect consumers with their food.
Last season, we saw firsthand that things were a little off.
Instead of dangling on branches waiting to be plucked, apples had fallen by the bushel onto the ground, many of them rotting, with hordes of yellowjackets swarming nearby as late-summer nectar sources dwindled and the insects descended on fallen fruit.
That takes the fun right out of the picking portion of the outing.
And while orchards have always had good years and bad ones, what Illinois growers are describing now goes beyond one unpleasant afternoon at the orchard.
Prairie Sky Orchard out in McHenry County, for example, has had to close for the fall harvest season this year after turbulent spring weather killed off most of its blossoms.
“In the last few years, they’ve been blooming ahead of schedule because we’re getting warmer weather earlier, and it’s just cyclic,” Prairie Sky Orchard owner SueEllen Arndt told the Tribune. “We’ve had some frosts in the past that have affected some of our blossoms, but we’ve never had it where we’ve had five frosts that have — it is hard to find an apple out there.”
Hard to find an apple? In an orchard? Imagine that.
In Chicago, we now get nine more warmer-than-average spring days per year compared with 1970, a trend that’s even more pronounced in other parts of the region, which experience 12 to 15 such warmer days, the Tribune reported.
Midwestern weather has never been particularly predictable, and Chicagoans know better than most that spring can arrive in February and retreat again in April.
Still, broadly speaking, we’re accustomed to a certain amount of predictability to the weather. It’s a comfort to know that while winter will be brutal, spring brings new hope of warmer weather and longer days, a promise fulfilled by a hot summer, followed by a crisp fall until the cycle begins again.
Predictability feels harder to come by these days.
The crops know it, too. And as spring temperatures grow warmer — 3.2 degrees warmer in Rockford and 2.2 degrees warmer in Chicago since 1970 — shifts can lead to big losses for our agricultural community. Just ask the Arndt family.
Whatever people think about the politics surrounding our changing climate, something is, indeed, changing. Illinois farmers can see it in their fields and orchards. And increasingly, the rest of us can see it too.
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Warmer winters can push trees through their developmental cycle earlier. When that happens, blossoms become vulnerable to freezes. Think of the relatively mild winters we’ve had in recent years, only for the cold to return again as we gear up for spring.
It’s time to stop treating acknowledgment of observable changes in our climate as a declaration of political allegiance. Farmers need to be able to talk about changing growing conditions, and policymakers should be able to think about how Illinois agriculture adapts, without every discussion immediately becoming a referendum on national climate politics.
You don’t have to agree about electric vehicles, carbon taxes, wind farms or federal environmental regulations to recognize what Illinois growers are seeing with their own eyes.
An empty orchard is pretty hard to argue with.
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