Georgia peaches may be hard to come by after winter freeze stunts growth

MCDONOUGH, Ga. - Justin Bieber says he gets his "peaches out in Georgia," but this year he may have to look elsewhere. A late winter freeze destroyed much of the state’s beloved crop.

"We probably have about a 40-percent crop," Jake Carter, owner of Southern Belle Farm told the FOX 5 Storm Team. The McDonough farm has been in his family for five generations.

He said in a "good" year, he tends to some 25 acres of peach trees. This year, the pickings are slim.

"It will be a supply and demand issue," he said. "The temperatures fluctuated. It got down as low as 27-degrees."

Carter and his team tried to battle Old Man Winter's mid-March return with technology to regulate temperatures for fruits already starting to bud.

"That helicopter hovering around 80-feet creates an inversion. The air is warmer up, so we are trying to push that warm down and cold air back up," Carter explained. "You’re literally only getting two to three degrees, and that could mean the difference between having a crop and not having a crop."

At this point in the season, his trees should have about 500 peaches each on them.

"A peach tree needs chill hours. On average 800 to 1000 chill hours, anything below 45-degree. When it’s below 45-degrees, that peach tree is storing up chill hours," Carter said.

This year a few of those chill hours came a bit too late.

Carter said it’s still too early to know how winter’s wrath will affect this summer’s peach prices.

But for the all the peaches that survived, the said they're just as sweet.

So, our early varieties usually come in around Memorial Day, a lot those have been hit," he said. "We are looking at the middle part of June before the peaches start coming in, and again it’s not to say there are no peaches down there, there’s just very few."