Swiss Apricot Farmers Grapple With Frosty Conditions

“The first torches were lit around 11pm,” Jean-Noël Devènes, a fruit grower in Baar, near Nendaz, told the Keystone-SDA news agency. He described a“nasty and biting” cold coming up from the valleys, which proved“difficult” to cope with as“air currents cancelled out the heat”.

Between 400 and 450 candles per hectare were lit, with the fruit grower working all night on two of his six hectares of apricot orchards.“We focussed on the most critical areas, where the blossom is already over and the fruit is more sensitive to the cold,” he explained.

In these areas, the temperature can be brought down to zero to 1 degrees Celsius, compared to -4 C where no candles were present.“We'll see tomorrow (Sunday) whether it was worth it,” said Devènes.

According to the fruit grower, such frost protection measures are usually implemented in mid-April.“This year, however, flowering was very early on some plots. We have to hold out for the whole of April and May,” he said. The material for such a night fighting against frost costs around CHF6,000 ($7,500) per hectare,“which is enormous”, said Devènes.

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According to Olivier Borgeat, secretary general of the interbranch organisation for fruit and vegetables in Valais (IFELV),“the situation is delicate for the apricot tree, as flowering starts about twelve days earlier than the ten-year average. The situation is not unusual,“but the season is starting earlier and earlier because the trees are flowering earlier,” Borgeat said.

At the beginning of flowering, apricots are very sensitive to frost. With cold weather and clear skies forecast, Friday night was a particular concern among growers. Other fruit trees are less at risk.

The most important measure to combat the frost is spraying the trees with water. The aim is to form a layer of ice around the buds, similar to an igloo, to protect them from excessively low temperatures.

On the slopes, the fruit growers mainly rely on candles, which they place under the trees, as irrigation by spraying poses a particular risk of erosion, Boreat explained.

Adapted from German by AI/sb