Bitter cold did lots of damage to area’s small farms, ranches
Crops wiped out for several operations; calves and milk also lost
“This was about as bad of a scenario as it gets. Whatever you were able to get picked ahead of the freeze, that’s all you’re going to have (to sell). This is going to require a total reset.” Jason Conrad, general manager of the Boacan 1660 Farms in Floresville
The garden run by Linda and Larry Starnes at their farm near Bebe, 65 miles east of San Antonio, might be small at about an acre and a half, but it has a big presence at some of the city’s best chef-driven restaurants, including Rebelle, Botika, Clementine and Meadow Neighborhood Eatery + Bar.
Those restaurants will be doing without for the next few months. Linda Starnes said they lost 90 to 95 percent of their crop in the freeze.
The broccoli’s gone, and so are the greens, cabbage and lettuce. The carrots and beets had finally started to sprout, she said, but now they’re gone, too.
While the leeks, green onions and turnips survived, getting new crops of radishes,
lettuce, kale and Swiss chard from the ground to the market will take 2 ½ months, she said. But if the Starneses have learned anything in almost 50 years working the ground, it’s how to start over.
The mid-february freeze destroyed thousands of acres of crops and killed livestock all over the state. Closer to home, it wiped out the crops of several small-time farmers who sell directly to consumers and restaurants and at farmers markets, and it will take until late March or early April before they have a spring harvest. But Texas farmers are used to the upheaval of the state’s feast-or-famine cycles of droughts and floods, of scorching heat and arctic blasts.
“With farming, it’s just part of it. Like Hurricane Harvey. Harvey wiped us out. And some years the bugs get you. It’s just the name of the game,” Linda Starnes said. “You just replant and start over. It’s not a quick recovery.”
For ranchers, the freeze’s toll was more of an emotional one, losing calves despite their efforts to keep them warm. Others lost milk when power outages rendered automatic milking machines useless.
The small silver lining for farmers is the timing of the freeze, coming at the tail end of the winter crop season, when most farmers were about to transition into planting spring and summer crops. Had the freeze happened in December or January, the losses might have been catastrophic.
The silver lining for ranchers is that the area was blanketed with snow instead of pelted with freezing rain for several days. Travis Krause, co-owner of Parker Creek Ranch near D’hanis, said he lost just a handful of his free-range chickens because snow allowed the birds to stay somewhat dry, whereas days of freezing rain would have been deadlier.
“That was the difference between only losing a handful of birds to what could have been hundreds,” Krause said.
In recent years, it’s become commonplace for local restaurants to source produce from local, sustainable farms. For the next few months, such products will have to come from larger commercial sources elsewhere.
Stefan Bowers, chef and partner at Rebelle, Battalion and Playland, said sourcing from an operation such as the Starneses’ farm is an issue of quality rather than supply. “We have access to the same or similar products, so the show goes on on our end,” he said. “But the quality simply isn’t comparable.”
Dan Ward, operational partner at Camp Outpost Co. in Southtown, agreed. “We’ve had to go with more of a where-we-canfind-it approach,” he said, adding that Camp Outpost will buy local farm produce again as soon as it comes back.
“I think as operators, we should be more aware of how we can help these local farmers out after the crisis,” he said.
The Boacan 1660 Farms in Floresville is small at just shy of 20 acres, but it, too, lost everything in its fields.
“This was about as bad of a scenario as it gets,” said the farm’s general manager, Jason Conrad. “Whatever you were able to get picked ahead of the freeze, that’s all you’re going to have (to sell). This is going to require a total reset.”
Small farms
Cody Scott, who owns Green Bexar Farm in St. Hedwig with his wife, said the freeze could potentially put them out of business. His bread and butter is year-round heirloom tomatoes grown in a vertical system inside greenhouses. They’ve proved a hit at farmers markets and with chefs at several restaurants in San Antonio.
Scott filled his greenhouses with heaters and fought to keep snow off the greenhouse frames. But power outages meant the heaters stopped working, and extreme cold temperatures killed all of the 2,800 tomato vines — some measuring 30 feet long — on the farm.
“We’ve lost everything,” Scott said. “We’ll have zero income for two months.” At least from tomatoes.
Despite the devastation, Scott remains optimistic he can save the farm. He said he’ll have some carrots, leeks, onions and lettuces ready in a couple of weeks, and those will help bridge the financial gap for a bit.
But the biggest bridge would come from a pay-it-forward system some small farms use called community-supported agriculture. It’s essentially a subscription to the farm, in which customers pay $350 upfront for 10 weeks of boxes packed with whatever produce is ready to harvest, with distribution beginning April 30.
If Scott can sell 60 subscriptions, that would mean nearly $21,000 to tide things over while the farm is without product to sell. As of Thursday afternoon, he still had 30 subscriptions to go before meeting his goal.
“There’s really no other option for me,” Scott said. “We’re either going to get through this, or I’ll have to sell the place.”
For Michelle Steubing, who sells at farmers markets and fills subscription produce boxes from the Betsy Blue Farm she operates on leased land 30 miles west of San Antonio near Rio Medina, the freeze killed 80 percent of her crop, taking out the cabbage, broccoli, lettuce and kale.
Her root vegetables survived, along with spinach and cilantro, but Steubing estimates her losses at $8,000. She’s counting on sales of eggs from her chickens and cans of her vegetables to help fill the gap, along with money she put away last year when people responded to COVID-19 grocery store shortages by buying more from small farms such as hers.
She’ll sell what she has on hand in front of her farm at 6312 FM 471 from 3 p.m. until dark Wednesday, then she’ll set up at the Farmers Market at the Cibolo in Boerne from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday.
In the aftermath of the whiteout, Steubing’s outlook is still optimistically green. She’s already bought 1,800 tomato, eggplant and pepper plants for the next round of planting.
“This time around, I don’t want to say I’m used to it, but I just keep looking forward,” she said. “I have the feeling it’s going to be a very good year.”
The storm also knocked out the 75-acre farm at the San Antonio Food Bank. Food storage was already low, about 70 percent of capacity, because of the high demand for help during the pandemic.
Eric Cooper, president and CEO of the food bank, said more than 90 percent of the food the group distributes comes from outside sources. But he estimated that about 20 tons of produce rotted in the fields, further straining the food bank’s ability to distribute food throughout the community.
“We’re blessed to be able to respond in this moment in time, but it’s a disaster within a disaster,” Cooper said.
Animals
For the ranchers in the San Antonio area who lost livestock, the losses weren’t as big financially, by they sure took an emotional toll on some.
The staff at Heartbrand Beef, which specializes in the Japanese breed of Akaushi beef in Gonzales County near Harwood, is one example. Jordan Beeman, president of the company, said his ranch was in the middle of calving season, with upward of 30 to 40 new calves birthed daily in February and March.
He said the cold weather resulted in a loss of about 70 calves. Beeman said ranch staff did all they could to keep the babies alive, even going so far as to put the newborns into pickups with the heaters on full blast. Heartbrand also set up warming stations in barns, toolsheds and anywhere else that might protect the animals from the wintry elements.
“The degree to which we tried to take care of these animals made it as hard on the cowboys as anybody else with any loss of life,” Beeman said. “You never want to lose an animal. But the newborns come out wet, and it was a race against the clock to get them into a warm environment. Normally, it’s not an issue, but it seems like normal doesn’t exist anymore.”
Robert Ragels didn’t lose any of the milking goats that he raises on his New Braunfels farm, but power outages still cost him income. He uses the goats’ milk to make cheeses he sells in area farmers markets under the Goatilicious brand.
Without electricity for his automatic milking machine, he had to hand milk his herd of 90 goats once a day for nearly three days. Hand milking, while legal, increases the chances of foreign material, such as hair or fecal matter, from falling into the milk bucket — not the kind of quality Ragels prides himself on.
No electricity also meant no working well pump, and thus, no water — and no way to heat the water in his 50-gallon storage tank in order to wash those milking buckets between uses. He had to throw out all the milk, an estimated loss of about $3,000 in inventory.
“There was no other way around it. We had to milk those goats every day or they can get infections, and it can alter their milk supply for weeks and months,” Ragels said. “There was nothing fun about it. Still, we made it out better than most, so it’s hard to complain.”
Loncito and Julie Cartwright own Peaceful Pork, a pig ranch about 90 minutes south of San Antonio in Mount Lucas. All 425 pigs in his herd have free range on his land. No cages. No barns. No man-made shelter. But they learned that pigs are survivors.
Loncito Cartwright said he found just one dead animal, a piglet, after the storm. A neighbor donated some bales of hay to scatter around the property, and the pigs rooted into them to nest, huddled together to keep warm.
“We always knew that pigs were smart enough to survive the heat, and now we know that they can handle the cold also,” Cartwright said. “It really was a miracle, and testament to just how smart these animals are. It wasn’t us that kept them alive; they knew how to do it themselves.”
Hill Country crops
While the Hill Country was frozen over, too, its most notable crops of wine grapes and peaches might be OK.
“Cold weather produces a bumper peach crop, and we are still a few weeks away from them budding on the limbs,” Conrad of Boacan 1660 Farms said.
Less clear is the effect on Texas’ grapes. Bob Young, winemaker and co-owner of Bending Branch Winery in Comfort, said the industry will have to play a waiting game. The vines froze, but they’re still four to six weeks away from budding.
Whether they bud and how much they bud will determine whether his 1-acre plot of Crimson Cabernet grapes made it, he said. The same is true for the 10 to 12 growers Bending Branch uses, from Center Point near Kerrville all the way out to the High Plains.
Neal Newsom, a viticulturist whose Newsom Vineyards southwest of Lubbock grows 150 acres of grapes for 16 wineries, said he’s concerned not just about bud damage, but also potential death to the vines themselves.
“Check back with me in about a month,” he said, in what’s sure to be a very long month for Texas grape growers.
The waiting is the hardest part.