For a lot of people up and down the East Coast, Georgia is synonymous with peaches. Think about it; when have you ever heard someone wax poetic about a California peach?
Turns out, though, Georgia peaches, and Southern peaches in general, are having a really tough year.
Mark Sanchez is the CEO of Lane Packing in Fort Valley, Ga. It's one of the big growers in the four county area smack in the middle of Georgia where peaches come from. His office by the loading dock is in fact in Peach County. He says climate is the secret to Georgia's peach dominance. He says California can't touch Georgia's weather. "In Georgia we have the cool nights, lot of rainfall, very hot summers," Sanchez said.
That makes a juicy peach. Hot in the summer here? You bet. It's those cool nights that were missing last winter and that's a problem. Sanchez said before peaches bloom in the spring, they need long, uninterrupted stretches of cold in the winter.