New Jersey apple farmer Kurt Alstede says running his business this year has been torturous.
“Everything is just ugly this year,” the first-generation orchard owner said.
April freezes decimated crops from the Midwest to the Northeast, leaving trees bare and orchards — which often rely on revenue from autumn apple-picking tourists — scrambling to stay afloat. At the same time, farm costs have been skyrocketing; the cost of operating a farm has grown by nearly 44% since 2018, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, a farmers’ advocacy organization. And in the Northeast, rainy weekends kept crowds away on key Sundays.
For the orchards trying to get by, that’s meant diversifying their portfolios with new crops and entertainment — or just hitting pause altogether.
“As a farmer in New Jersey, I think given everything that’s occurred, we can’t wait for 2027,” Alstede said. “We’ve had enough of ’26.”
Vegetables, hay rides, and pumpkin patches
In the past, farms wouldn’t have to worry about temperatures dipping below 25 degrees during apple bloom. “Now it’s a thing that seems to happen every few years,” said C.J. Walke, the orchard program manager at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.
Alstede, a first-generation farmer, has spent his year pivoting. When summer camps came to tour an apple orchard, they learned about the joys of picking pumpkins and vegetables instead — something the kids also found fun, if not as iconic as apple picking. Even so, “it’s been a tough grind this year,” he said.
“People really want to pick apples, and when you don’t have enough apples, there’s only so many pumpkins…and other things you can sell,” Alstede said.
Josh Morgenthau, the third-generation owner-operator of Fishkill Farms in New York, said the farm lost all its cherries and 90% of its peaches and nectarines to the freeze. Around 60% of the apple crop was viable. With that dreary outlook for summer fruit, Fishkill leaned into live music, wagon rides, and festivals.
“It really made a huge difference, and I credit it with why it’s not going to be the worst season ever despite the cards we were dealt,” Morgenthau said.
Courtesy of Fishkill Farms
Beyond fun programming, Fishkill Farms has diversified its crops. Morgenthau said they now grow strawberries, blueberries, cherries, nectarines, and pears — all of which have slightly different seasons and sensitivities, so that it’s “very, very unlikely for all of our crops to fail in one year.”
Of course, pivoting and diversifying isn’t possible for every orchard; some orchards might not have the space, while others might not be able or willing to deal with the logistics or expenses of creating a concert or kitchen on their premises. Running a farm in the US is already expensive without investing in a business transformation. Farmers are taking on record debt, with 2026 debt forecast to hit $605 billion, and that borrowing has gotten pricier as interest rates increased. Alstede said that he’s been borrowing more money to get through the year, and most of his loans are variable rate — meaning they’re beholden to Federal Reserve moves.
For smaller hobby farms, the apple juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Monte Marti, who owns Big Apple Orchard in Iowa, has closed it for the season. They lost almost all of their apples in April, Marti said. It’s been a quiet fall without their usual visitors and high school staffers. For him, the orchard and farm operation is entirely a hobby; for him, it pays more dividends in community than revenue. He hopes they’ll have more apples next year: “We can’t have any less!”
For Fishkill Farms, which was battling the apple crop loss and rainy Sundays in the early fall, this season wasn’t a total wash, especially with all of the programming they added in to supplement their crops.
“The weather in October really turned out beautifully, and we wound up having a pretty decent apple season,” Morgenthau said. “I call this season the best bad season possible.”
And Jared Buono, the director of Cornell’s Hudson Valley Research Lab, said that apple lovers should support their favorite orchards by buying local. Even with freezes and high costs, the art of the orchard is still very much alive.
“It’s not going anywhere,” Buono said, “and the growers are as innovative as ever.”
