Effects of climate change may be threatening apples
Officials ask Texas residents to reduce electricity use
Patrick and Sara Mcguire have been growing apples since they were married 25 years ago. Their 150 acres in Ellsworth, Michigan, dubbed Royal Farms, are a mix of sweet apples and the bitter varieties suited for making hard cider.
Last spring they put in a new crop of Honeycrisps, one of America’s favorite apples, only to discover an unwelcome visitor just a few weeks later: a bacterial menace known as fire blight.
“We actually removed about $10,000 worth of trees by hand,” Patrick Mcguire said. “It might’ve been 25% of that lot.”
Fire blight is a bacterial pathogen that spreads easily during blooming season. It has the potential to kill not just individual trees but entire orchards. Though not a new problem for apple growers, it’s been looming larger as the climate crisis brings longer, warmer and rainier springs that expand the window for it to infect trees.
The disease poses a particular threat to cider apple growers. Terry Bradshaw, a research assistant professor at the University of Vermont, said they are at risk because the European varieties they rely on are biennial, making them especially vulnerable to fire blight. “(They will produce) a lot of fruit in one year and a little in the other,” said Bradshaw. “It’s just wall-to-wall blossoms during bloom – those are a whole lot more targets (for the bacteria) to hit.” Making matters worse, they bloom later in the year.
If one crop of cider apples is lost to fire blight, it will be two years before those trees produce again, he said. And with a 10-year pipeline from ordering trees to producing fruit, that kind of setback could prevent growers from staying afloat. “Twenty-five years ago, fire blight was novel, it was rare,” said Bradshaw. “Now climate change is a thing, and fire blight is a thing, and everyone thinks about it every year.”
But it’s not just cider apples that are at risk. Increasingly, all apples as well as other fruit crops such as pears are in danger from such climate-induced afflictions.
Nikki Rothwell, a specialist with the Northwest Michigan Horticulture Research Center at Michigan State University, said the climate crisis isn’t just problematic in terms of fire blight, but also because it’s allowing for more generations of insect pests each year.
“If growers cannot mitigate risk in some way, fruit farming is not a sustainable model or business,” she said.
Apples used in cidershave high levels of tannins and phenolic compounds that make them unpalatable for eating, but ideal for cider.
The craft cider industry has been on a decadelong growth spurt, according to Michelle Mcgrath, executive director of the American Cider Association, an industry lobby. In 2019, Nielsen research said the sector was worth $1.2 billion, with about 1,000 cider makers in the U.S.
Over the last decade, the industry grew tenfold in sales and producers, according to Mcgrath. Regional and local craft brands account for 35% of market share, Nielsen reported.
But climate change and the resulting uptick in fire blight may put an end to the good news, warned researchers and orchard operators.
Karen Lewis is a regional fruit tree specialist with the Center for Precision & Automated Agricultural Systems at Washington State University. Her state is the nation’s leading apple-producer.
“From 2016 to 2018, we had considerably more days of fire blight risk during bloom than in the previous 10 years,” said Lewis. “In areas where climate change results in warmer springs, fire blight risk will increase.”
Once inside a tree – through a blossom, a broken stem, even a torn leaf – the bacteria causes growths that can girdle the tree and kill it. A few weeks after infection, it will produce “ooze,” said George Sundin, a professor at MSU who researches fire blight. “Ooze is what the pathogen uses to travel between trees. When rain hits an ooze droplet, a cloud of pathogen can rise from there and be taken by the wind to settle wherever. And if that’s on another apple tree, it can lead to infection.”
Since fire blight is easily spread by wind, rain and insects, stopping it in the Mcguires’ Honeycrisps was key to reducing the chance it would infect their 60 acres of cider trees. “Fire blight was not typically a problem in northern Michigan, because we’re so far north and these bacteria really love warm weather,” said Rothwell of MSU. “That’s really changed.”
Rothwell said colleagues in Canada have contacted her because they are seeing fire blight for the first time and have no experience in treating it.
Francis Otto, the orchard manager for Cherry Bay Orchards in Suttons Bay, Michigan, started noticing a buildup in fire blight about 7 years ago. Last spring, he said, the conditions for infection in their 275 acres of trees were unprecedented.
The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 topped 600,000 on Tuesday, even as the vaccination drive has drastically brought down daily cases and fatalities and allowed the country to emerge from the gloom and look forward to summer.
The number of lives lost, as recorded by Johns Hopkins University, is greater than the population of Baltimore or Milwaukee. It is about equal to the number of Americans who died of cancer in 2019. Worldwide, the COVID-19 death toll stands at about 3.8 million.
The real totals in the U.S. and around the globe are thought to be significantly higher, with many cases overlooked or possibly concealed by some countries.
The milestone came the same day that California, the most populous state and the first to impose a coronavirus lockdown, lifted most of its remaining restrictions and ushered in what has been billed as its “Grand Reopening.”
Elsewhere around the country, states continued to move closer to normal, step by step. Massachusetts officially lifted its state of emergency Tuesday, though many restrictions had already been eased, including mask requirements and limits on gatherings.
With the advent of the vaccine in mid-december, COVID-19 deaths per day in the U.S. have plummeted to an average of around 340, from a high of over 3,400 in mid-january. Cases are running at about 14,000 a day on average, down from a quarter-million per day over the winter.
President Joe Biden acknowledged the approaching milestone Monday during his visit to Europe, saying that while new cases and deaths are dropping dramatically in the U.S., “there’s still too many lives being lost,” and “now is not the time to let our guard down.”
The most recent deaths are seen in some ways as especially tragic now that the vaccine has become available practically for the asking.
More than 50% of Americans have had at least one dose of vaccine, while over 40% are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But demand for shots in the U.S. has dropped off dramatically, leaving many places with a surplus of doses and casting doubt on whether the country will meet Biden’s target of having 70% of American adults at least partially vaccinated by July 4. The figure stands at just under 65%.
As of a week ago, the U.S. was averaging about 1 million injections per day, down from a high of about 3.3 million a day on average in mid-april, according to the CDC. At nearly every turn in the outbreak, the virus has exploited and worsened inequalities in the United States. CDC figures, when adjusted for age and population, show that Black, Latino and Native American people are two to three times more likely than whites to die of COVID-19.
Also, an Associated Press analysis found that Latinos are dying at much younger ages than other groups. Hispanic people between 30 and 39 have died at five times the rate of white people in the same age group.
Overall, Black and Hispanic Americans have less access to medical care and are in poorer health, with higher rates of conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure. They are also more likely to have jobs deemed essential, less able to work from home and more likely to live in crowded, multigenerational households.
The first known deaths from the virus in the U.S. were in early February 2020. It took four months to reach the first 100,000 dead. During the most lethal phase of the disaster, in the winter of 2020-21, it took just over a month to go from 300,000 to 400,000 deaths.
With the crisis now easing, it took close to four months for the U.S. death toll to go from a half-million to 600,000.
Texas officials are asking residents to reduce electric use “as much as possible” this week because of significant strain on the state’s power grid.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, is making the request because of “significant forced generation outages combined with potential record electric use” in June, according to an ERCOT release.
According to ERCOT, generator owners have reported approximately 11,000 megawatts of generation is on forced outage for repairs. Approximately 8,000 megawatts is thermal and the rest is intermittent resources. According to the summer Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy, a typical range of thermal generation outages on hot summer days is around 3,600 megawatts. One megawatt typically powers around 200 homes on a summer day.
“We will be conducting a thorough analysis with generation owners to determine why so many units are out of service,” ERCOT Vice President of Grid Planning and Operations Woody Rickerson said in the release. “This is unusual for this early in the summer season.”
The number of outages should decrease throughout the week, according to the power companies via ERCOT.
Wind generated power is expected to be about 1,500 megawatts lower than
the typical 3,500 to 6,000 megawatts from 3 to 9 p.m., the peak time of power consumption.
Wind output is expected to increase throughtout the week, according to ERCOT.
Monday’s peak load forecast could exceed 73,000 megawatts, which would be a June record. The high June peak was 69,123 megawatts set on June 27, 2018, between 4 and 5 p.m.
ERCOT is asking Texas residents to do the following:
h Set thermostats to 78 degrees or higher; every degree of cooling increases your energy use by 6% to 8%.
h Turn off lights and pool pumps and avoid using large appliances like ovens, washing machines and dryers.
h If you don’t need something, turn it off and unplug it if possible.