As the Georgia peach season approaches, growers are hoping for another season with stronger pricing and stronger demand like last year.
Lee Dickey of Dickey Farms Inc. in Musella, Georgia says it will start peach harvesting around mid-May and the season will go until mid to late August. “We had a little bit of a late freeze in March with some mild damage to some early varieties of peaches. But besides that, we’ve had good temperatures,” says Dickey. “We’ve had enough cold weather and enough chill hours and so far the fruit looks good aside from that little bit of damage to those select varieties.”
Dickey says he’s hoping to have good fruit sizing based on the temperatures right now and is counting on the bulk of the volume to make up for those select affected varieties.
Strong demand for 2022?
As for demand, Dickey looks to have a repeat of the 2021 season.
“We’ve actually had really strong demand the past few years. We hope that that keeps up,” he says. “With COVID, people were grocery shopping a lot and eating at home more and that’s where the bulk of the volume is sold. We’re primarily a fresh market here in the Southeast. But we put good high quality fruit into consumer’s hands last year and we think they’ll remember that.”
As for pricing, he’s hoping for fairly strong pricing this season. “I think the Southeast will be a little bit light on volume to start the season off so I’m sure pricing will come out strong,” he says. “But we hope to maintain that for the season but we’ll see how the markets develop.”
