Okanagan fruit farmers hope to salvage year with different crops

After one of the most devastating winter cold snaps in recent memory, Jennifer Deol and her husband made the agonizing decision to rip out more than a hectare of prized peach trees from their Kelowna, B.C., orchard. 

Extreme temperatures in early January severely damaged stone-fruit trees and grape vines up and down the Okanagan Valley, killing off the delicate buds on branches and vines that would have turned into this season's crops. 

Now, Deol and other orchardists are planting hardier crops in an effort to mitigate their losses and adjust to the extreme weather events that have hit farms in British Columbia in recent years.

"Not even a single [peach] flower bloomed. We knew that we had to get ahead of this and pivot," Deol said. 

"We are a couple of years [from] effectively going bankrupt and folding our business in."

Deol's mature peach trees were capable of producing softball-sized fruit — so large that in 2016 the previous owner of the orchard registered a peach as the heaviest ever recorded. 

This year, in an effort to salvage the growing season, Deol is planting table grapes and rows of corn where those peach trees once stood.

"It's very tough," she said. "Farmers are very resilient but we're still humans at the end of the day and this is our livelihood. This is our income."

British Columbia has more fruit farms than any other province, with more than twice as many growers as Ontario and Quebec combined. 

The total estimated value of fruit production in B.C. is more than $450 million annually, according to Statistics Canada. The vast majority of B.C.'s tree fruits are grown in the Okanagan Valley with cherries, apples and peaches being the most commonly grown tree-fruit crops in the region.

Last year saw a nearly two per cent decrease in fruit sales in B.C. due to lower yields with growers warning the fallout from this year's freeze will be significantly worse.

Although apple trees tolerated the extreme cold this past winter, which saw temperatures in Kelowna plunge to -27 C in mid-January, stone fruit trees suffered significant damage, especially peaches, apricots and nectarines, according to Sukhdeep Brar, vice-president of the B.C. Fruit Growers' Association.

"No one has any peaches ... It's a tough year after another tough year after another tough year," he said.

In addition, Brar estimates only about one-third of the Okanagan cherry crop survived this year.