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Ela, who owns Ela Family Farms with his wife and business partner, Regan Choi, has kind eyes and an easy smile that make him well-suited to selling plums and cherries at farmers’ markets. His glasses are often perched on a mop of tousled hair that has gone white after 30 years of running around his 98-acre organic orchard in western Colorado.

That’s how he described what he was doing on April 17—running around.

“It is a high-risk business. If it happened again next year, I don’t know if we could survive another year.”

The trees had bloomed three weeks early, a dangerous time, given frost potential. But the farm had been through post-bloom freezes before, so he and his team knew what to do. They applied minerals for extra frost resistance. They set up nearly a dozen giant wind machines—to raise temperatures close to the ground among the trees—to run all night.

Around 8 p.m., the temperature dipped below freezing, and it stayed there until nearly 11 a.m. the following day, at one point falling as low as 21 degrees. The freeze was longer and colder than any that had come before, and it completely wiped out his crop.

“It is the first time in my memory, in my life, that we have had zero percent fruit,” he said over Zoom in July. “We have found nine peaches on 12,000 trees. And even worse, it’s the whole county. It’s 40 miles of growing districts.”

Plum trees in bloom at Ela Family Farms, 2025. (Photo credit: Regan Choi)

Orchard farmers across the country have similar stories: early blooms, severe freezes, and devastating losses, regardless of regional climate.

In New York alone, state officials estimate more than $30 million in losses of apples, stone fruit, and other crops. In Wisconsin, freezes in April and May caused significant loss of apples and damaged the fruit that survived.

In Pennsylvania, some loss estimates have been as high as 70 to 90 percent for apples; 90 to 100 percent for peaches, nectarines, and apricots; and 95 to 100 percent for cherries and plums.

Late-spring freezes predate orchards, but research shows that a warming planet is creating specific conditions that make this kind of destruction more common. And as emissions from greenhouse gases continue to rise, this year is less an anomaly than a harbinger of tough times ahead.

While farmers of a wide variety of crops are experiencing the impacts of climate change from droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events, the economic impact on orchards can be particularly high: It can take up to eight years of year-round care for a tree to bear fruit—with one chance a year for a harvest and no way to simply replant.

“It is a high-risk business,” Ela said. “If it happened again next year, I don’t know if we could survive another year.”

But a quick drop below freezing after that point can disrupt the transition to fruit if the tree is still in bloom, or the tiny developing fruitlets are not yet strong enough to survive.

That happened this April in Wisconsin, said Erin Warner, the head grower and horticulturalist at Warm Belly Farm, just east of Madison, as she walked through rows of all manner of crisps—Honeycrisp, EverCrisp, Ludacrisp—on the farm’s 10 densely planted acres of apple trees.

The orchard had an extended bloom period, Warner said, and during the four weeks the trees were in bloom, the temperature dropped below freezing seven times. “Twenty-eight degrees is a critical temperature in apples. If you’re at that temperature for 30 minutes to an hour, maybe you’re losing 10 percent of your crop,” she explained. “But if you’re there between three and four hours or longer than that throughout the night, you might lose 90 percent of your crop.”

Because Warm Belly has 26 tree varieties, each was at a different stage in the bloom process, and the losses were variable. Warner estimated the orchard will get about 20 to 30 percent of the harvest it had last year.

The freezes have had other effects. Some of the apples have a band of discoloration around the center, which makes them harder to sell, and on some trees the fruit is concentrated in the upper canopy, affecting the orchard’s pick-your-own business. Warner is already planning on opening the orchard to customers for fewer weekends this coming fall.

“I think farmers that grow perennial crops in systems like this are going to have to know that there are going to be good years and bad years.”

“As climate changes and as our spring temperatures fluctuate drastically between warm and cold temperatures, we’re going to experience more of this type of loss,” Warner said. “I think farmers that grow perennial crops in systems like this are going to have to know that there are going to be good years and bad years.”

For both Ela Family Farms and Warm Belly Farm, the key factor driving the impacts was early bloom, and that’s where the research shows climate change is playing the biggest role.

“Bud burst is happening earlier and earlier as climate warms,” explained Cat Chamberlain, a lead climate and resilience scientist at The Nature Conservancy who has studied the impacts of climate change on trees and now works on forest restoration.

Meanwhile, the final freezes of the year are not necessarily also happening earlier, she said. “And if that timing is perfect, where [a freeze] hits right during that period of time when the tree is most sensitive, then we’re going to see these really big events occur.”

Researchers have documented the phenomenon all over the world, including in Iran, South Africa, and California. In the Midwest, climate models suggest the last freeze date will get earlier by mid-century, helping shift the process back into alignment. But the freeze dates will also get more variable, making damaging freezes harder to predict.

Shorter winters may decrease the quality of the buds, Chamberlain said, potentially making them more susceptible to a late-spring freeze. Research out of Cornell University has also shown that sudden temperature spikes in winter, which are becoming more common as the climate changes, can trigger premature awakening in trees that leaves them more vulnerable to freeze damage over time.

That’s what Warner is worried about in Wisconsin, where she said they’ve recently been experiencing warmer weather in the winter.

“When [the trees] break dormancy early because of these early spring events, that can lead to injury in the trees,” she said.

Meanwhile, in Colorado at the start of the year, Ela wasn’t even thinking about freezes; he was thinking about water. Ela Family Farms is in a desert, where agriculture relies entirely on snowpack for its water. In the spring and summer, snow from the mountains melts, feeding the orchard and filling the reservoirs he uses for irrigation.

This winter, Ela said, “our local ski area at one point had a 13-inch base in January. They should have had 60.” Depending on measurements, some deemed it the worst snowpack year on record. If it wasn’t the worst, it was close to it.

While not all droughts are directly tied to climate change, clear evidence shows droughts in the Southwest are increasing as the world warms. Researchers in Colorado published a study just last month that found this past year’s snow drought in the Upper Colorado River Basin was made 14 times more likely by climate change.

For Ela, that meant using his reservoir water allotment earlier. Now he’s rationing it, hoping it lasts until fall, when El Niño will (hopefully) deliver rain. But meting out the water comes with costs too. Stressed trees are not as resilient when extreme weather hits, which can also mean less fruit.