ATLANTA — A darkness has fallen across the cobbler belt. You can barely find a peach.
A winter that was a touch warm, followed by a series of hard freezes in March, devastated the Georgia peach crop. Some hopeful state officials estimate that only 10% of the crop survived. But out in the field, the prospects appear worse.
“If we made 2% of a crop, I would be surprised,” said Jeff Cook, a University of Georgia Cooperative Extension coordinator who helped put together an application for federal relief. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently granted it, declaring 18 Georgia counties natural-disaster areas and making an additional 38 counties eligible for federal loans. The cost to the state, including lost jobs and peach sales, Cook said, could reach $200 million.
In a state where eating a peach over the kitchen sink is a birthright, cobbler recipes are passed down through the generations and a baffling number of streets in Atlanta are named Peachtree, a summer without peaches is unfathomable.
There is little relief to be found in the orchards of neighboring South Carolina, which grows more than twice as many peaches as Georgia but has lost 75% or more of this year’s crop.