CANTANKEROUS WINTER DEALS BLOW TO AREA FRUIT CROPS

Bill Beggs examined the buds on one of his peach trees last week at Pioneer Orchard in Cape Girardeau.

The 1996 fruit crop may be anything but peachy.

A particularly cantankerous winter has dealt a severe blow to orchard owners in Southern Illinois and Southeast Missouri. The end result may be fewer crops and higher prices at the supermarket checkout.

This season already has been more difficult than most, and more crucial times are still ahead for the fruit industry in both states.

"Fruit-growing is a difficult occupation," said Ed Billingsley, a Cooperative Extension Service horticulture adviser. "Growers have to sweat out extreme cold weather in the winter and then hope to survive late frost in the spring."

Fruit growers this year are not so optimistic in Illinois, fearing that the recent arctic blast of subzero temperatures may have wiped out Southern Illinois' multimillion-dollar peach crop.

The bitter cold this year may not have been as devastating to Southeast Missouri peaches.

The late January and early February deep freeze did not hurt apples or strawberries, but growers still have to weather the next couple of months.

"The cold weather did some damage in Southern Illinois," said Billingsley, "We definitely have some crop damage in peach trees."

Billingsley said growers may not have half a crop, and in some orchards where the temperatures plunged to 18 below zero in some Southern Illinois areas, 85 to 95 percent of buds were dead.

Growers check the buds by cutting them. "If the inside is black or brown, the bud is dead and won't produce," said Billingsley.

"If we have a crop this year, it'll be a miracle," said Roy Jacobs, who has aboaut 5,000 peach trees.

Midwinter, said Billingsley, is critical for peach trees because the dormant buds are easily damaged by severe cold, especially 10 degrees or more below zero.

Peach growers attending a meeting at Cobden, Ill., in early February weren't optimistic.

One orchard owner, Jim Eckert of Eckert's Orchards, said all of the buds he cut were brown inside. Eckert's orchard produced more than 30,000 bushels of peaches last year.

Extreme cold weather has proven harmful to Southern Illinois fruit crops over the past five years, causing millions of dollars in damages to peaches, apples, strawberries and blackberries.

"We really don't know about some of strawberries this year," said Billingsley. "A lot of Southern Illinois farmers have switched to plastic cultural strawberries. We don't know about those."

The California type of cultural strawberry is planted in the fall and harvested in the spring.

"This is a new berry in this area," explained Billingsley. Farmers only get one crop from them. The regular strawberries in this area usually produce berries over a five-to-six-year stretch. "Most of the regular berries were covered with straw and will probably be OK."

"The temperatures here were not quite so cold in Southeast Missouri," said David Diebold of Diebold Orchards. "We may lose some buds, but at this point we're still looking at an 80 percent crop, which would be good."

Lowest temperatures recorded in the immediate area were about 8 degree below zero.

Bill Beggs, a peach grower from Cape Girardeau, said bud examinations indicated that good crops could be expected.

But Missouri growers are not home free yet.

"We could still have a killing cold when the blooms start," say Beggs and Diebold.

The blooms are tender, said Diebold. "They can take weather under freezing, but if it dips below 26 we could be in trouble."

In 1995, Missouri growers harvested 9.5 million pounds of peaches, the second-highest production year during the past decade.

That almost doubled the 5 million pounds production of 1994, a year marred by blasts of freezing temperatures in March.

The state's peach crop hit a decade high in 1991, with 11 million pounds and a $2.5 harvest.

"We had good crops in four of the past five years," said Diebold.

Apple trees, which are more durable than peach trees, are big producers in Missouri. Last year the $9.5 million crop produced more than 38 million pounds of apples, up from 1994 but nowhere near the record of 1993, when apple producers reported more than 56 million pounds.

Illinois growers harvested 12 million pounds of peaches in 1995, which sold at an average of 26.6 cents a pound. That was a marked improvement over 1994, when the state's 4.8 million pounds of peaches sold for 18.4 cents a pound.

Illinois' peach crop, grown exclusively in Southern Illinois, also hit a 10-year high in 1991 with a $6.4 million harvest.

The number of Illinois apple growers has declined over the past decade. In 1987, there were 824 apple growers with more than 8,700 acres of orchards. The count last year was 362 commercial apple growers with 5,710 acres, all in 10 downstate counties.

The U.S. is the leading fruit-producing country in the world, raising 10 percent of all apples, pineapples and plums; 20 percent of lemons, oranges, peaches and strawberries; and 55 percent of grapefruit.

Totaling up a list of 24 fruits ranging from peaches to apples, grapes to grapefruits, and tangerines to tangelos, the fruit business is a $6-billion-plus industry in the U.S.

California and Florida are the big two in fruit production. California is number one in the raising of a number of fruits, including peaches, lemons, strawberries, raisins, grapefruit, plums, tangerines and dates.

Florida tops the list in oranges, limes and tangelos.

Today's consumers can find mangos, kiwi fruit, tangerines, oranges, grapes, dates, papaya and other tropical and subtropical fruits on the shelves, along with apples almost the year round.

The supply of fruit is the result of agri-science, which has developed storage in controlled atmosphere to provide fruits year round.

And although Missouri and Illinois are not ranked among the top 10 states in fruit production, the two states do provide large quantities of apples and peaches to American consumers.

Missouri is also a big producer of grapes and watermelons. Over the past three seasons the state has produced more than 2,500 tons of grapes and more than 1,200 tons of watermelons.