Want to go apple-picking? Some Illinois orchards might not open after several spring frosts killed crops.
In almost three decades of growing apples at her family’s orchard in northern Illinois, SueEllen Arndt and her husband, Ralph, never experienced anything like this year.
Five spring frosts killed most of the blooms on their trees, she said, forcing Prairie Sky Orchard to close for the 2026 fall harvest season.
“In the last few years, they’ve been blooming ahead of schedule because we’re getting warmer weather earlier, and it’s just cyclic,” Arndt said. “We’ve had some frosts in the past that have affected some of our blossoms, but we’ve never had it where we’ve had five frosts that have — it is hard to find an apple out there.”
Located in the village of Union in McHenry County, Prairie Sky has 2,500 dwarf trees that grow 15 apple varieties, as well as pears.
Climate change is consistently warming winter temperatures across northern Illinois, signaling earlier spring arrivals to plants, said Trent Ford, the state climatologist.
At the same time, while final spring freezes are happening earlier in the Midwest, that trend is much more variable and hard to predict. A study he co-authored last year found full bloom dates for apples are expected to shift one to two weeks earlier in the spring across different Midwest climates by mid-century because of warmer winter and spring air temperatures.
When plants start leafing and blooming sooner, they become more exposed to freezes, a phenomenon known as “false spring.” Even though some studies show false springs have become less common across most of the United States, parts of the Great Plains and the Midwest could face higher risk in the future if heat-trapping pollution increases.
“So this is a mismatch between weather processes and climate processes that’s making it so that we could — despite warming winters and springs — sort of paradoxically be increasing the risk of spring freeze … on certain types of trees, certain species,” Ford said. Specialty crops like fruit, vegetables and nuts are generally more susceptible to extreme weather and sudden climate shifts than commodity crops like mass-produced grains.
This has happened in recent years, he said, when mild winters are followed by a spring freeze that happens later than typically expected — or even one that is “right on time” when trees are “way ahead” in their progression due to the warm winter.
“I would say this year started out pretty volatile,” said Jenna Spychal, chairperson of the Illinois Specialty Growers Association and board member of the Illinois State Horticulture Society, noting that spring began a week or two earlier.
Chicago now has nine more warmer-than-average spring days in a year than it did in 1970, according to an analysis of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data by Climate Central, a climate science education nonprofit. In other parts of northern Illinois, from the Quad Cities to Peoria to Rockford, that trend is even more pronounced, with 12 to 15 more warm spring days.
Spychal has not only heard about the impacts of earlier springs and following frosts from growers across the state, but has experienced it firsthand at her family’s four-generation Jonamac Orchard, an apple orchard and pumpkin patch 35 miles south of Rockford in DeKalb County.
“(Spring) is the most fragile time for our apples because, if there is a freeze, it can kill our blossoms before they become apples,” Spychal said.
Average spring temperatures have increased by a few degrees across northern Illinois, due entirely to climate change from human activities like fossil fuel burning, according to Climate Central: by 3.7 degrees in Peoria, 3.2 in Rockford, 2.9 in the Quad Cities and 2.2 in Chicago. Air temperatures of 28 degrees can kill 10% of apple blossoms after the first bloom, whereas 25 degrees can kill as much as 90%, according to researchers.
“So, just a slight variation in temperature can mean substantial loss for our growers,” Spychal said.
Another way climate change can affect fruit crops is by reducing winter chill, a period of above-freezing temperatures that trees need to produce flowers and fruit. When there is no sustained chilling, or when winter warm spells offset previous chilling, it can affect the timing of budding and pollination, as well as a fruit crop’s quality and yield.
There is a so-called Goldilocks temperature zone, a sweet spot or ideal chilling range for dormant fruit trees, usually between 32 and 45 degrees. The more days that trees stay in that range, the faster they will eventually break dormancy — “everything else being equal,” Ford said.
“What we’re seeing in northern Illinois,” he said, “is that, because of warming temperatures, the periods of time in January and February where 30, 40, 50 years ago (when) we would not have gotten warm enough … we can stay in that range much longer and accumulate more quickly the amount of chilling that the tree needs.”
Historically, chill accumulation in the northern Midwest occurred mostly before mid-December and after mid-February, when there would be the highest frequency of hours in the ideal chilling temperature range.
But Ford’s study found most of the region’s increasing trends in chill accumulation since the 1950s have occurred in the second half of the dormancy season, after Jan. 1. And projected warming could mean fewer chilling hours in September and October, with a substantial chill accumulation from November to March, and less chilling in April and May.
Ford said fruit and vegetable growers in the state recognize the vulnerability of their systems to climate, both during the growing season and the middle of winter.
“Some of the safety nets that are there for commodity crops (are) not as well developed for specialty crops. So, when we have big losses related to weather for corn and soybeans, a lot of times folks will have crop insurance,” Ford said. “We don’t necessarily have all the same options for specialty crops. … A lot of times, it’s just a complete loss.”
Spychal echoed the same from her lived experience.
“As apple growers, obviously, we are somewhat at the mercy of the weather, and we have limited ways to combat that,” she said.
Solutions to earlier blooms followed by hard freezes include using large frost fans or wind machines, and sometimes even helicopters, to circulate warm air toward the plants and prevent cold air from settling at night, as well as heaters or burn barrels to generate heat.
But some of these can be expensive. For instance, a fan can cost between $50,000 and $60,000, including diesel or gas for its engine and a concrete pad to install it on.
“At the same time, how much is your crop worth?” Spychal said. Her family installed their first fan in 2012. “It made sense because it was, essentially, an insurance policy.”
Even after getting a fan, growers still hope that they never have to use it, she said.
“But with the way that our weather patterns have been fluctuating and changing,” she added, “with these slightly more volatile springs, we have been using them most every year at least once.”
As Jonamac Orchard begins harvesting its first varieties of the season, the crop is looking good and promising, Spychal said.
The most damage the apples suffered this year was in the form of frost rings, which look like brown circles and develop when ice forms under the skin.
“It doesn’t look very pretty for sales in a bag, but we make a lot of sweet apple cider, and we also make wine and hard cider,” she said. “So those apples we are still able to use in our operation as juice.”
Not all growers have big enough operations to justify the cost of fans or helicopters, however.
Such is the case with Prairie Sky, which began as a pumpkin patch when SueEllen and Ralph Arndt’s 10-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son combined their allowance money for a total of $8 to buy seeds. That fall in 1991, they grew some 200 pumpkins, which they sold within a week.
After doing that for a few years, clients started clamoring for apples. So the family planted their first 100 trees — now the orchard has grown 25 times its original size.
SueEllen Arndt still calls their orchard a “backyard” operation. Now, it’s just her and her husband running it, as their children have moved away and on to other things.
On their website, the couple writes, “We have had some good seasons and some not-so-good seasons, but we have stuck with it because we say, ‘there is always next year.’”
And yet, these setbacks can have longer-term consequences for the trees, since fruit crops are not replanted and harvested or complete their life cycle every year, but rather live and produce for several more.
“One of the things that those of us who manage a perennial crop, like apple trees, have to deal with is: T his is not just this year’s problem,” Spychal said. “This is going to impact us next year, because this plant is still here and is setting buds and reacting to the stresses of this year, and then that reaction will have implications on next year’s harvest, as well.”