Free Daily Headlines

News

Set your text size: A A A

2013 rainfall beat average by 2½ feet

Some apple trees in low lying areas drowned in the record rainfall of 2013.

Four days before Christmas, a dreary winter storm dumped 3½ inches of rain on Henderson County. More of the same came on Sunday, Dec. 29, two days before the end of the year.

The December rain made a fitting end for the wettest year on record. How wet was it?

The record rainfall was 2½ feet above normal and the overly generous helping of water from the sky beat the previous record by more than 9 inches.

“It was really exceptionally wet,” said meteorologist Harry Gerapetritis of the National Weather Service office in Greer, S.C. “It was a case where around here we usually have a very dry fall if we don’t have a tropical storm. We did have a short break where it was dry for a while and then it got wet again.”

The wet weather devastated the county’s farm economy because the rains came during the heart of the growing season, especially for grains and vegetables.

The rainfall total through July of 51.8 inches was already the highest on record for the first seven months of the year. “Nobody alive,” Agriculture Extension Director Marvin Owings Jr. said at the time, “has ever seen weather like this.”

The brief window of dry weather in August and September came just in time to salvage the county’s apple and grape crops. The damage to wheat, corn, tomatoes and other produce had already been done.

In August county agriculture officials estimated that the rain and flooding, especially in the fertile French Broad and Mills River valleys, had caused $42.7 million in crop damage.

Henderson County apple farmers actually harvested a bumper crop of apples. But they had added costs in production because buckets of rain forced them to spray more often for fungus.

“It’s been challenging this year like with most commodities with all the rain,” Owings said. “We had some low lying areas that actually lost trees because of flooding and we may still see the repercussions in other low lying areas this spring and summer with this collar or crown rot.”

Once Henderson County and other apple growing regions up and down the East Coast picked the abundant crop, the price for process apples dropped through the floor.

“The process market was a disaster because of lower prices,” said Dana grower Doug Marshall, who has been growing apples for 50 years. “The quantity exceeded demand. They sold for 6½ cents a pound. That’s half what they should have brought. Last year it was 45 cents.”

In 2012, when a spring freeze wiped out most of Henderson County’s apple crop, farmers who had fruit made good money on whatever they could pick. Marshall had about a 25 percent crop last year.

“You’ve just got to take the two years and average them together,” he said. “Process apples, you can’t look at them one year at a time. You have to look them at over a 5-year period.”

Growers are worried that they won’t see the full effect of the record rain of 2013 until the spring and summer of 2014.

“I anticipate probably a 25 percent drop in volume because of the heavy crop load this year,” Marshall said. “I anticipate a good deal of damage in the low areas that stayed wet so long. Actually the damage to the rootstock will show up two to three years from now. It’ll slow the growth and the tree starts getting weaker instead of stronger and it should be removed.”

Marshall grows 55 acres of Galas, Fugis, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Romes and Pink Ladies. About 70 percent of his crop was packed and sold as fresh apples, which brings a much higher return.

“All my returns aren’t in but I’d say from what I understand I’ll be well satisfied” with the proceeds from fresh apples, he said. “Galas have done pretty well. A high percentage of them packed out.”

Many farmers have stored apples in hopes of that the price will go up.

“A number of growers have more fruit in storage than they typically would,” Owings said. “What they’re hoping is they will be able to move that fruit throughout the rest of the winter. The problem is they’ve got money tied up not only in growing the apple. Cold storage costs them every day that fruit is in storage. So they’ve got to recoup the cost not only of production but of storage.”

To sum up: grain and vegetable growers had a disastrous year, apple farmers had a good year for quantity and quality but not price. On New Year’s Day, farmers will be hoping for the sweet spot of good growing conditions and a favorable market.

 

Record rain

 

Rainfall total (as of Dec. 28): 74.22 inches

Normal rainfall: 44.62 inches

Amount above normal: 29.6 inches

Previous record: 64.91 inches (1973)

Amount above previous record: 9.31 inches

Source: National Weather Service records at Asheville Regional Airport