Weather No Longer Concern for Middle Georgia Peaches

FORT VALLEY, Georgia – (41 NBC/WMGT) After both a warm winter and frigid temperatures all within the past few months, peach farmers in Middle Georgia are starting to see their crop come in,
and they expect great things this summer. 41 NBC spoke with two of the largest peach producers in Georgia about the upcoming season.

“Mother Nature is so fickle when it comes to dealing with peaches so we don’t know really til the last minute as to what we’ve got to sell or what we have to offer,” Duke Lane Jr. said. 

Duke Lane Jr.’s life has been dedicated to peaches. He and his family run Lanes Southern Orchards and for the past few months, he and Robert Dickey of Dickey Farms have had anxiety about the weather’s effect on the peaches.

“We were all sort of thinking that this was gonna be a very warm winter which is not good if you’re in the peach business,” Lane said.

41 NBC spoke with Dickey last week and he said, “We were real worried that we were running a few days late and we’ve had all this cold weather in March.”

Normally this time of year, the peach crop will be coming in to full bloom. Peach farmers say their mark for a good crop is by Easter. Since Easter was earlier this year and the weather was still cold, farmers were left guessing.

Now that anxiety has turned into optimism.

Dickey said, “hopefully Georgia is going to have a real good peach crop this year.”

Lane told 41 NBC that some varieties of peaches can actually withstand the colder temperatures, but now, he’s not worried because of the streak of recent warm days.

“We feel like all of the frost and the cold nights are behind us so you know we’re moving forward,” Lane said.  “we’ve had plenty of rain, we’ve had record rains in February as a matter of fact, we’ve had record cold in March so we really feel good about the whole situation.”