Late freeze forces local peach farm to experience shortage

TRENTON, S.C. (WRDW/WAGT) - Peak peach season is finally here, and we are not talking about sweet Georgia peaches.

Some farmers in the CSRA have yet to recover from February’s cold snap.

Thanks to this, some are crossing state lines to get their sweet peaches from a farm in Trenton. Before you hit the highway, we stopped by to see it first-hand.

“We’re small. If we get hit, it’s pretty much bad,” said Larry and Pam Cook, Cook’s Farm.

This year, the late freeze killed most of their crop.

“We have to source peaches around Johnston and stuff this year. Normally, we have our own, but this year, it’ll be different,” he said.

In 63 years of farming, there’s only been one other year like it.

“We’ve had one year that we didn’t have any. That was in 2007 ... 2008 in that range,” said Larry.

They lost 75 percent of their crop.

“We knew we had a problem when they bloomed in late February. And in early March, we had the cold weather, and it kind of wiped them out a lot. We’ve got some peaches, but in other places, we don’t,” said Cook.

It’s caused them to close on Sundays but open their doors to other produce.

“Now we do all different crops, vegetables, and stuff like that and get stuff from the farmers market and try to diversify our business. We’re in the greenhouse business,” he said.

While change is change, the dollar sign hasn’t.

“We haven’t gone up at all because you can overprice anything,” said Larry.

One of the reasons why this farm was hit harder was because they only have 75 acres of land. In comparison, others have as many as 1,000 acres of trees.

Copyright 2023 WRDW/WAGT. All rights reserved.