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Lower quantity, but high quality found in some Fredericksburg farms during a hot, dry year

Farmers in the Hill Country say it's been a strange year due to the high heat and lack of rainfall.

TEXAS, USA — Hot and dry conditions have led to what farmers are calling a "strange" harvest this year in the Hill Country. They say there is good news and bad news when it comes to how the drought has affected the crops.

Some farmers say the lack of rain has impacted the quantity of fruit they yield per harvest. The Texas Heritage Vineyard outside of Fredericksburg has grown a lot since it started six years ago.

“We built this from scratch and we love showing people the fruits of our labor,” vineyard owner Susan Johnson says she’s learned a lot of lessons in 2022.

“It’s been a really strange year,” Johnson said.

“It’s been so hot and so dry that really everything is accelerated,” Johnson says the total crop yield is about 20 percent below last year.

“From a ton of grapes, we would hope to get about 70 cases of wine, so you can see what a 20 percent reduction in that would be,” Johnson says. 

She says silver lining of the lower yield is the grapes on her vineyard are high quality.

While you can’t compare apples to oranges, or in this story, grapes to peaches, some similarities between the different types of farms are shared.

“They have great flavor, they’re delicious, I’m working on making a peach brandy for our distillery that’s going to be fantastic, but when we don’t have rain, you’re not going to get that full palm-sized peach,” Orchard Manager Dietz Fischer, who operates the distillery bearing his name in Fredericksburg, said.

The peach orchards have been a fixture in Fredericksburg since the 1920s, he says.

There are only so many adjustments they can make due to the variables that go into farming.

“The peaches are normally this big or so, you can see they’re just tiny, and that’s just due to no rain essentially,” Fischer said.

Fischer and other farmers say while their crop yields are down, they still want to reap what they’ve sown.

“It is certainly God’s will whether we have rains or freezes, and our hope is to mitigate any potential damage and learn the best we can,” Johnson said.

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