Climate takes its toll on the ‘cherry capital of the world’

This coverage is made possible in part through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in northern Michigan.

Traverse City is known as “the Cherry Capital of the World,” and the Wunsch family has been growing the small stone fruit for six generations. The farm that bears their name sits on about 1,000 acres in the middle of Old Mission Peninsula, a spit of land poking into a bay at the northern end of Lake Michigan. This region has long been considered a cherry haven where long rows of trees teem with red fruit. But as the planet warms, things are beginning to change.

As he walked rows of dormant trees last month, pointing out sweet varieties like black pearls, skeenas and sweethearts, Raul Gomez, operations manager at Wunsch Farms, said volatile weather in recent years has taken a toll. 

This season was particularly hard. An unusually mild winter followed by a warm, wet spring marked by torrential rain left a lot of the fruit rotting on the trees. That led to an explosion of fungi and pests. Disease like brown rot diminished the quality of several varieties, and the size of the harvest.

“It’s getting more and more expensive to farm,” said Gomez. “You’re spending a lot more money getting to the finish line.”

Everyone who works the land knows they’re at the mercy of the weather, but even by that measure this was a challenging year for Michigan’s cherry farmers. Growers throughout the state, which produces one-fifth of the nation’s sweet cherries and about 75 percent of its tart cherries, have struggled with mounting losses. By the time the season came to a close over the summer, as much as 75 percent of the state’s sweet cherry crop was lost. Although tart cherry production for northwest Michigan was up almost 40 percent over last year, the quality of the fruit declined.

Many growers are adapting to the difficult market and changing climate, planting different varieties or embracing high-density orchards with trees packed more closely together, an approach that makes them easier to harvest while lowering costs and improving quality. For Isaiah Wunsch, CEO of the farm that bears his name, the key to survival is “not putting all of our eggs into one basket.”

That approach isn’t a perfect solution for some of the financial issues that have pushed some to the cusp of bankruptcy, and state officials and the federal government have intervened. Earlier this fall, the Department of Agriculture approved Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s request for emergency assistance to cover crop losses through a federal disaster declaration. 

But while such federal assistance can be helpful in the short term, Gomez said, “none of us really want to get to the point where it’s considered a disaster, and now we are.”

Similar struggles are playing out on farms nationwide, with some regions, like the Midwest, facing the onset of an agricultural recession, said Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University. The downturn largely stems from extreme weather, rising labor and production costs, imbalances in global supply and demand, and declines in what growers earn and what they receive in disaster relief. This year has seen many farmers selling an array of commodities, including wheat, soybeans, and corn, at below break-even prices. Their finances have been further strained by increased price volatility. The latest federal forecast predicts farm income will decrease 4 percent over last year in what some deem the sector’s worst financial year since 2007. 

That’s a key reason consumers are paying more at the supermarket, something President-elect Donald Trump made a centerpiece of his re-election campaign. Appearing at a September rally in northern Michigan, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance invited cherry farmer Ben LaCross to describe the industry’s financial hardships and hail Trump’s approach to regulations and trade. Vance denounced the cost of cherries as a “lose-lose proposition” for growers and consumers. The argument resonated: On average, voters in the nation’s most farming-dependent counties backed Trump by more than 77 percent, a big increase over 2020.

Yet nowhere in the incoming administration’s messaging on the crippling economic landscape the nation’s small farmers must traverse has there been any discussion of the human-caused climate change shaping that terrain. Rather, Trump, who has called the crisis a “hoax,” has threatened to dismantle the Inflation Reduction Act, pledged to roll back emissions regulations, and promised to boost fossil fuel production.  

Sara McTarnaghan, a resilience planning and disaster recovery researcher at the Urban Institute, said increasingly severe weather and other climate impacts will further test a “safety net is already strained and underperforming” as a warming world is mounting demand for government relief. Yet she sees “big threats” to many of these programs during Trump’s presidency. Many of those threats are laid out in Project 2025, a sweeping conservative policy blueprint, written by multiple veterans of Trump’s first term, that calls for cutting crop insurance subsidies, eliminating land conservation incentives, and other farm programs. 

Still, it is not yet clear what the Trump agenda and his views on climate will mean for agricultural sector disaster relief, said McTarnaghan. This is because small-government politicians don’t hesitate to ask Washington for money when their constituents need help. “Even in red states, we see governors asking for presidential declarations, seeking federal assistance to recover from disasters, even in places where the talking point on a non-disaster day might be about reducing government spending,” she said. 

Ultimately, any regression on climate action will end up requiring more funding to bail out growers. “Farmers are often at the front end of the climate challenge,” said Billy Hackett of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “You can’t stop that once-in-a-generation flood or fire or hurricane that’s becoming more and more frequent.”

When disaster strikes, farmers look to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for help. The agency is, among other things, an essential provider of farm safety net programs like federal crop insurance and emergency crop subsidies, or disaster assistance aid. 

Going into the next four years, Hackett is concerned about how the incoming presidential administration will prioritize helping small and historically overlooked farmers. The 2022 Emergency Relief Program, which allocated financial relief to producers impacted by wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters through the USDA, had a “streamlined” revenue-based relief aid application process option, noted Hackett, implemented by the Biden administration to “reach these uninsured farmers who they knew were historically left behind.” Small farmers in particular have long struggled to access afford costly crop insurance premiums, and experienced similar issues with eligibility and coverage when applying for federal disaster aid relief. Just 13 percent of the nation’s 1.9 million or so farms were enrolled in a crop insurance plan in 2022.

Other supplemental disaster relief programs, such as the Wildfire, Hurricane, and Indemnity Program enacted in 2017 during the Trump administration, have been criticized for how “demanding and complicated” the application process was for uninsured small and historically excluded farmers, while only reaching benefiting larger, industrial farms, said Hackett.

Though government bailouts for farmers hit historic highs during his first term because of losses incurred due to tariff fights and the pandemic, Trump has a history of trying to slash funding for crop insurance and may have better luck this time, given that he’ll have a Republican majority in both chambers and Project 2025 specifically calls for curbing subsidies for crop insurance and eliminating commodity payments, among other farmer safety nets. 

That would harm growers like Leisa Eckerle Hankins, a fifth-generation Michigan cherry farmer whose family has relied upon crop insurance to offset devastating losses. Her family-run operation lost 97 percent of its sweet cherry harvest to a fungal brown rot infection brought on by rain last summer. “It was a straight loss,” she said. “We could not go in and shake the cherries on the tree.” 

On top of everything else, returns for their harvests have been unreliable, and they’ve faced increasing competition from other market-dominating countries. “Every industry, everybody has struggles at times, and this is our struggle time,” Eckerle Hankins said. “And so we’re coming together to look at how we can change things.” 

Editor’s note: Raul Gomez, who was interviewed for this story, is a member of Interlochen Public Radio’s Community Advisory Council. The council has no editorial control over stories.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate takes its toll on the ‘cherry capital of the world’ on Dec 17, 2024.