How Many Apple Farms Actually Lost Their 2026 Season to the April Freeze?

What happened

Freezing nights between April 1 and April 21, 2026 hit fruit buds across the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast. Pennsylvania's own agriculture department put the state's specialty crop losses at 150 to 200 million dollars, opened a 10 million dollar Fruit Grower Freeze Disaster Assistance Recovery Grant for growers who lost at least 30 percent of a crop, and USDA granted 58 Pennsylvania counties a disaster designation. Every account published since has been about one farm or one state. This page is the count across all of them, from the farms' own words.

The number

We track 303 farms offering pick your own apples across 14 of the affected states. 302 of them were checked on or after August 1, 2026, and 233 have their own website on file. 8 of the 303 publish words that say the picking is off for 2026, and a further 2 say it was cut short.

• 8 of 303 say apple picking or the whole 2026 season is off.
• 2 say the freeze shortened or limited their picking this year without cancelling it.
• 5 say a different fruit, cherries, peaches, nectarines or strawberries, was lost to the frost while apples continue.
• 2 describe the regional damage on their own pages while their own apple season runs.
• 286 publish nothing either way about the freeze.

By state, the 303 farms in the count sit as: MA 82, ME 58, NY 35, OH 31, PA 30, CT 19, NJ 12, VA 10, MD 8, NH 7, RI 5, VT 4, DE 1, WV 1.

The farms that say the picking is off

The farms whose picking was cut short rather than cancelled

This is the commonest shape the damage takes and the one a headline misses. These farms are open. They say themselves there is less to pick, or fewer days to pick it on, so the sensible thing is to check the farm's own page before setting off.

The farms that lost a different fruit but still have apples

The farms describing the damage while staying open

What this number is not

It is not a census of orchards in these states, and it is not a loss estimate. It is a count over one stated denominator: the pick your own apple farms on this site, in these states, as of September 13, 2026. Most of those records were built from official state directories rather than from reading each farm's own site, so a farm that has posted a cancellation we have not read yet is not in the count. That makes this a floor. It can only go up as we read more farms, and it will be recounted and re-dated every time we do.

We also do not report a percentage of the crop lost, or a change against last year, because we do not hold that and nobody should invent it. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture's own figures are the place for the money, and each farm's own page is the place for whether you can go picking.

How this was collected

These figures come from prices and dates published by the farms themselves on their own websites, collected and re-checked by Bloom and Pick. Every farm in the count links to the page the figure came from and the date we last checked it. Farms that do not publish a price are not counted, and are named separately so you can see who is missing. Farms that publish prices online tend to be larger and more visitor focused than farms that do not, so these medians likely sit above what a typical small farm charges. We report medians and ranges, never averages, and we state how many farms are in every number. Nothing here is estimated, modeled, or filled in.