PALISADE
On the coldest nights in April, Charlie Talbott spends those dark hours glued to his phone or racing around in a pickup truck and revving engines — not for entertainment, but as part of a high-stakes fight against plummeting temperatures to save his family’s peach crop.
“It is your income,” Talbott said. “A few hours at subcritical temperatures changes the whole year.”
One of those cold nights happened Friday, and the Talbotts didn’t escape unscathed — nor did other fruit growers in Colorado.
Peaches are one of Colorado’s most significant fruit crops, and the orchards in Palisade, just outside of Grand Junction, are some of the most famous in the state. But every year, growers endure a nail-biting threat in April: the potential for a hard freeze that could decimate their crops and kneecap their businesses for the year.
The solution? Fires. Wind machines and special sprays. Plus a lot of prayer.
“I’ve quipped I’d give up a twelfth of my life if I could skip April every year,” Talbott said. “It’s not fun.”
Peaches are a big deal for Palisade. While peach orchards might grow next to wine grapes, cherries or pears, peaches reign supreme. Visitors buy peach stuffed toys and decor and pass by peach-themed flyers. Homes feature peach kitchen dishware and some restaurants are named after the juicy, summer fruit.
They’re also a prime fruit crop statewide. Peaches account for about 75% of fruit production in Colorado, according to the Colorado State University Extension.
In 2023, Colorado’s peach sales ranked fourth in the nation, totaling 15,600 tons, according to the 2024 Colorado statistics bulletin, the most recent from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. California was No. 1 with 480,000 tons while U.S. sales totaled 588,540 tons.
The peach industry also brought in about $26.7 million per year on average between 2014 and 2023, according to The Colorado Sun’s analysis of USDA statistics.
That’s the norm — except when a hard freeze hits.
Unlike a regular freeze, when temperatures hover around 32 degrees Fahrenheit, a hard freeze is defined by temperatures that fall to 28 degrees or below. At these chilly lows, ice crystals can form inside plant cells, often leading to irreversible damage that marks the end of the growing season.
In the 1960s, a deep freeze devastated orchards in part of the valley known as the Redlands. It was enough, after several poor market years, to shutter farm businesses. Now, the area is filled with subdivisions, Talbott said.
In 2020, a hard freeze in mid-April decimated the state’s peach crops, prompting Gov. Jared Polis to request federal aid through a disaster declaration.
“We had 26 degrees in 2020 for about six hours with the machines running, and we had 12% of the crop,” Talbott said.
Talbott and two of his brothers, Nate and Bruce, were working in the Talbott Farms office on the eastern end of the Palisade valley, finessing their plan of attack in the hours before the hard freeze was expected to hit.
When growers lose a crop, they’re essentially forced to work without pay, Nate said. They still have to keep fertilizing, fixing machines and maintaining the land — they can’t just go get another job.
“We used to say, three years in a row, and you don’t exist anymore,” Bruce added.
LEFT: Charlie Talbott, co-manager of Talbott Farms, checks the air temperature during a hard freeze early in the morning of April 17. When temperatures fall to 28 degrees or below, the cold can kill peach crops and end the growing season. RIGHT: Talbott Farms crews drive between rows of peach trees to turn on wind machines during the hard freeze. (Shannon Mullane/The Colorado Sun)
That night, the forecast was set to drop to 26 degrees, one forecast said. Others said 28 or 29 degrees.
The atmosphere in the office was focused, with an undercurrent of stress, as the sun started to tip toward the horizon of the Palisade valley.
This year, the Talbotts and other peach growers in Colorado had up to $50 million in sales on the line.
Prepping for go-time
The Talbott family, like others in the Palisade area, has been managing orchards for 100 years and five generations.
Peaches originated in China, but their history in Colorado goes back to the 1600s, when Navajo and Puebloan cultures began planting peach trees. In the late 1800s, the U.S. destroyed many of the orchards to open land to nonnative settlers, according to the Colorado Virtual Library.
Settlers planted their first peach trees in the Grand Valley in 1883. Then, fruit production boomed after irrigation projects in the early 1900s diverted water from the Colorado and Gunnison rivers.
Now, there are more than a half-million peach trees in Colorado, mostly located on the Western Slope in Mesa, Delta, Montrose and Montezuma counties.
For the Talbotts, nurturing orchards is a family heritage and lifestyle. They started cleaning up around the trees at 8 to 10 years old. As kids, they glued labels onto wooden crates and helped with the harvest, even if it meant missing a day of school.
Now, the brothers prune trees with their grandkids or take the toddlers on rides in side-by-sides vehicles through the rows of peach trees, all about 10 feet tall and arranged in a “V” shape facing north to south.
“It’s a great business. It’s really stressful, but we’re conditioned for it,” Nate, the youngest of the brothers, said. “But life’s good.”
Except, maybe, in April.
On Friday, the brothers constantly checked their phones, where an application showed weather data from individual monitors located around their sprawling acres of peach, grape and cherry orchards.
The temperatures could vary by 4 degrees from one spot to another, Charlie Talbott said.
Nate Talbott, co-manager of Talbott Farms, checks the temperature on this phone during a 2:30 a.m. break. He and other crew members stayed up all night during the hard freeze to monitor conditions and make sure the wind machines were working properly. (Shannon Mullane/The Colorado Sun)Other growers in the area planned to place small fires under their trees to try to warm the air. Residents with one or two peach trees on their properties used colorful string lights, which emit a small amount of heat to help the growing fruits.
The Talbotts mainly relied on special sprays with amino acids that were part of a CSU research study and wind machines — 30-foot-tall industrial fans with propellers that blew air downward, displacing the cold air and replacing it with slightly warmer air from above.
They’d use the machines until the valley’s natural breeze started. They hoped it would begin quickly, or that clouds would come in to hold warmer air closer to the Earth’s surface.
But the sky was crystal clear, the air was still and the weather was cold. Quite cold.
Fighting the freeze
At around 11 p.m. Friday, Charlie Talbott stood in his kitchen alternating between phone calls, drinking coffee and checking his phone’s weather monitoring application.
“Lord, help us save our fruit,” Charlie’s wife, Brenda, said.
He was deliberating, trying to decide when they needed to turn on the wind machines in his section of the orchards. Collectively, the machines used about 600 gallons of fuel per hour, and each hour running at full throttle put more wear and tear on the machine.
But the longer peaches were exposed to the plunging temperatures, the higher the risk of damage.
In part because of the early end to the winter, the trees were further into their seasonal growth. Typically, peach trees bloom between April 5 and 25, according to the USDA. This year, many blocks were already at later stages, like petal fall, shuck split or early fruit set — all more vulnerable stages for freeze injury, according to Colorado Fresh Fruit Co.
Talbott took a call: Other crews were firing up the machines in areas of the family’s orchards. They had 60 machines to turn on, each protecting about 10 acres from the cold.
Charlie Talbott starts a wind machine. The tall industrial fans displace cold air around peach trees, protecting them from low temperatures from a hard freeze. (Shannon Mullane/The Colorado Sun)
It was earlier than usual — they expected to turn on the machines around 2 or 3 a.m. The temperatures were dropping into the lower 30s, and the fans were running in areas that usually didn’t need it, Talbott said.
The pink surveyor’s ribbon hanging from a tree outside their kitchen window, an easy way to check for wind, showed no sign of movement.
“We’re hoping and praying for a canyon breeze,” Talbott said, between a phone check and a gulp of coffee.
“Have you seen one?” Brenda asked.
“Nope, we’re dead still.”
Before midnight, it was go-time.
Talbott hopped in a small pickup and sped from wind machine to wind machine, flipping on the engines and making sure the propellers whirred to life. Others were doing the same. Pairs of headlights raced around the Talbott orchards. Residents across the valley could hear the machines thrumming like jet engines. The fires in other orchards cast an eerie orange glow above the trees.
Within 30 minutes, Talbott’s sections were done. But the work wasn’t.
Talbott ran another circuit to make sure the machines were working properly, murmuring that he hated seeing the stars on hard freeze nights because clouds hold in the warmth. In the past, they’d been forced to replace an engine in the middle of the night. One time, they found a raccoon living in the machine.
The crews took breaks to catch a wink of sleep with one eye open. They checked weather conditions every 15 minutes. At 2:30 a.m., they tiredly drank coffee while comparing notes in Talbott’s kitchen.
The temperatures seemed to hover between 30 and 34 degrees with some help from the wind machines. The cold dawn hours would still be risky, the family said.
For Charlie Talbott, April and hard freezes were like having a sledgehammer hanging over his head, held up by a fraying thread.
“You’re watching the weather. Watching and waiting. And on cold nights, the thread frays a little. It doesn’t fall. But every now and then, it falls: You’re smoked, and boom your crop’s gone,” he said driving between rows of peach trees. “But I will tell you, it makes a philosopher out of you.”
A wind machine rotates over Talbott Farms grape vineyards in the early-morning hours. (Shannon Mullane/The Colorado Sun)The aftermath of a hard freeze
At some point Friday or early Saturday morning, one of the Talbotts’ wind machines lost its propellers entirely. The 6-foot metal wings gashed a tree as they fell to the ground below the machine. It was the first time that’d ever happened, Talbott said.
They’d find out later that portions of the Grand Valley hit the low 20s, like the CSU Fruita Experimental Station. Orchard Mesa bottomed at 28.1°F at 3:50 a.m., with multiple hours below freezing and several hours at or below 30°F, according to the Colorado Fresh Fruit Co.
By 5:30 a.m., the Talbotts were again in the kitchen. They’d had some luck: The pink ribbon in the front yard started to flutter. A slight breeze picked up and helped keep temperatures above critical lows. The mood eased, as much as it could with no sleep and hours of work to go.
“Running (the machines) right now is kind of optional,” Talbott said.
By 8 a.m., all of the machines were off.
Within hours, the Talbotts started to gain an early idea of the damage but it will be weeks before they see the full extent.
Most of Delta County had 100% crop loss on all fruits from that same night, Talbott said.
At Talbott Farms, they trimmed off stems and sliced the young fruit in half. If it was green, it would survive. But if it was brown or black inside, it had died. At least 70% of their fruit trees, based on acreage, will likely grow to their full capacity. About 30% took some damage — some worse than others, he said.
The family’s next step is to watch the fruit, hoping signs of damage show so they can thin the damaged fruit, allowing healthy fruit to grow to full size, Talbott said.
Charlie Talbott wipes his brow after staying up all night working to protect the family’s peach, grape and cherry crops from a hard freeze. (Shannon Mullane/The Colorado Sun)Even in the midst of a long night, Talbott focused on the bright side.
While the pickup truck bounced over rough ground under a dark, clear sky, he recalled years when the sledgehammer did fall. In the 1990s, when his kids were still young, Talbott Farms was hit by damaging freezes several years in a row.
“Why me?” he recalled thinking. “We did everything right.”
But he always had a roof over his head and food on the table. He realized that every career came with uncertainty. When life is hard, that’s when everything that’s wonderful bubbles to the top, he said.
“My kids never knew how little we had,” Talbott said. “You take stock and say, you know what? There’s far more to be grateful for than to feel pity for what isn’t.”
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