MELTDOWN: As water dries up, Creston Valley’s farmers worry for the future

High temperatures, a declining snowpack and impending water shortages are a climate change trend that have farmers in the Creston Valley worried.

Raj Smagh, who has farmed just under 100 acres of cherries since 2010, says farmers have had several bad years of either no crop or poor ones.

“It has been like this for three or four years,” he says. “Surviving has become very hard for farmers. Usually you can have a bad year and survive, but this is the fourth year. The scale is not balanced any more.”

In February, all of the 35-40 commercial cherry farmers in the area lost this year’s crop due to an extreme frost that fell to -28 C in February. The frost killed the parts of the flowers that make the fruit.

But it was not the frost alone that did the damage, says longtime Creston orchardist and market gardener Frank Wloka.

“The cold was the final straw, but the part that killed the trees was nine weeks of abnormally warm temperatures (beforehand).”

Because of the unseasonably warm weather, the trees had come out of dormancy, making them vulnerable to frost when the temperature dropped.

Wloka says some of his trees are now collapsing and dying because of damage to the cambium layer, which feeds any buds that may have survived.

“This is my first experience of losing a crop and then losing the trees,” he says.