New Jersey drought may impact on agriculture, particularly parching peaches

The peach bud that should be swelling with promise right now is brown and brittle. It hangs from a branch in Salem County like a small, dead bell. John Hurff has been farming these trees for more than 40 years, and he cannot remember a spring that felt quite like this one.

“The peaches are hurt pretty bad,” Hurff said Tuesday, walking the rows of Schober’s Orchards and Farm Market. “I think the apples could possibly be hurt bad, but I really won’t know for another couple weeks to see what grows and what doesn’t.”

The cause is a one‑two punch that no farmer can block. First came the frost, a hard freeze that killed off the delicate buds just as they were waking up. Then came the drought, a slow, grinding absence of rain that has left the ground hard and the air thirsty.

New Jersey is one of the nation’s top growers of peaches, a fruit so tied to the state’s identity that schoolchildren learn to recognize its blush‑red skin and sweet, juice‑dripping flesh. But this season, those peaches may be scarce. And what does make it to market will almost certainly cost more.

The state’s Department of Environmental Protection issued its weekly drinking water supply update on Wednesday, and the numbers do not make for cheerful reading. Between April 17 and April 24, the state saw somewhere between one‑hundredth of an inch and 1.3 inches of precipitation. The average was a quarter of an inch. A quarter of an inch over seven days, in a state that desperately needs sustained, above‑average rainfall just to climb out of the hole.

The rain that fell over the past weekend — April 25 and 26 — gave the ground a brief drink, but the DEP notes that due to data cutoffs, that rain was not even included in this week’s indicators. So the official picture remains dry. The long‑term pattern of dry weather still has its grip on New Jersey. And so the Drought Warning stays in place.

The warning is not the most severe level — that would be a Drought Emergency, which brings mandatory restrictions. But a warning is a signal that the margin for error has vanished. The DEP is urging residents to limit lawn watering, plant drought‑tolerant native species, postpone seeding, use mulch, install rain barrels, take cars to commercial car washes, sweep sidewalks instead of hosing them down, check for leaks, and install water‑efficient fixtures.

These are the small sacrifices of domestic life. But for the men and women who grow the state’s food, the sacrifices are not small at all.

Bill Exley owns Exley’s Christmas Tree Farm, and his season has already gone sideways. It is planting and digging time, the busiest stretch of the year. But the ground is so dry that he has had to start irrigating weeks earlier than normal. Irrigation means fuel, equipment, labor, time. Money.

“Because we’re not just going to let the trees die, we are going to irrigate, but it’s going to be very costly for us and very time‑consuming for us,” Exley said. Then he added the sentence that should keep every grocery shopper awake at night: “At this point, if we don’t start getting rain, it could get really bad.”

At Schober’s, Hurff is facing the same arithmetic. The peach buds are damaged, but the trees themselves still need water just to survive. The corn and soybean planting is supposed to start in three or four weeks. That requires moisture in the ground. If the moisture is not there, he will have to wait. A delayed planting means a delayed harvest, and a delayed harvest means the vegetables show up late or not at all.

“When you’re dry, you have to have water,” Hurff said. “Everything needs water. Stuff doesn’t grow as well. Puts a lot more stress on the plant, puts a lot more stress on you.”

That last part — the stress on the farmer — is the piece that does not show up in the DEP’s weekly updates. There is no indicator for sleepless nights. No gauge for the feeling of walking through an orchard and seeing a season’s worth of hope turned brown. No number for the knot in the gut when you realize that this year’s peach crop, the one you have been tending since last summer, might simply not happen.

The DEP says it is monitoring the situation closely, updating the indicators weekly, and keeping the public informed. The next update is scheduled for May 6 or May 7. The state is encouraging conservation. The message is “Use Water Wisely.”

All of that is responsible and proper. But it does not make the rain come. And out here in the farm country of southern New Jersey, where the peach trees are bare and the soil is cracking, the wisdom that matters most is the kind that falls from the sky. Until it does, every farmer in the state is walking the rows and wondering how much longer they can hold on.