New Jersey Farmers Hit With Double Whammy Of Spring Freeze, Soggy Weekends

New Jersey farmers are getting squeezed from both sides this fall: a brutal late-April freeze wiped out the bulk of the state’s fruit crops (think 90-plus percent of cherries and peaches, 60 to 70 percent of apples), and rainy weekends have been keeping visitors away from the pick-your-own farms that depend on fall agritourism to recover. Rutgers estimates the crop losses alone cost somewhere between $135 to $170 million, and veterans like Chester’s Kurt Alstede say in 45 years of farming they’ve never seen anything like it.