In the Shenandoah Valley, small farmers adapt to a changing climate | Agriculture | dnronline.com

Fifty years ago, at their family’s 200-plus-year-old fruit farm outside of Timberville, Patrick Ryan’s grandfather wrote the dates that his wide varieties of apples and peaches would ripen on the barn door. But by 2026, the dates were off by at least a week.

Though Ryan kept the historic barn door notes when he bought the farm from his parents, every variety of fruit now ripens earlier than planned as the Shenandoah Valley experiences warmer temperatures each year.

“We start picking earlier,” Ryan said. “For one, the fruits are getting riper sometimes than what we’re used to. Sometimes, the apples grow so fast that they split on the trees. They get bad spots, they get rotten way earlier than normal.”

Not only do Ryan and his employees have to pick the fruit earlier than usual, but next year will be the first year in the farm’s history that they irrigate the whole field. It’s costly, but it’s preferable, Ryan said, to losing their entire crop to drought.

“I’ve been impacted by a flood or drought every year for the last five years,” Ryan said. “It’s kind of harder to grow the fruit. It’s going to be even harder to pay for it.”

The Shenandoah Valley — along with the rest of the world — is experiencing more intense weather conditions as the climate changes.

Ryan is one of many fruit, vegetable, and animal farmers looking ahead to dealing with difficult, changing conditions during this year’s growing season. The changes affect farms that have been in the family for generations, like Ryan’s, as well as newer farms, pushing farmers to adapt in innovative ways to protect their crops and animals.

For local growers, weather can be devastating

Despite Ryan’s relatively good luck of having the orchard in a location shaded by a mountain, the dry conditions can still weaken a fruit crop.

“We’re going to irrigate due to the fact that we have droughts a lot more often now,” Ryan said.

Ryan also grows cherries, which are even more affected than apples or peaches. Because they’re not his main crop, he can eat the cost if they don’t grow, like what happened this past spring when the blossoms bloomed early and froze.

“They’ve probably been affected the most by climate change. We keep having early springs,” he said. “Every time it warms up really early in the winter, it’s bad, because it’s always going to get cold again.”

Like Ryan’s cherries, blueberries can bloom too early, and when they do, there are devastating consequences for the crop.

Blueberry farmer Haley Coloso, the youngest of five sisters, inherited Hobbit Hill Farm in Mt. Crawford from her father, who planted blueberry bushes there in the 70s and 80s. Until recently, losing a whole crop was almost unthinkable — it only happened once when she was a teenager. But for the past five years, it’s been an annual concern.

The reason freezes are dangerous is not necessarily because of the cold nights, but the warm days that precede them. If it gets warm too early in the season, the blueberry blossoms will bloom too early, and the late freeze will kill them — a problem that would have happened only rarely when Coloso’s father ran the farm.

In 2020, the family lost their entire crop due to late-season freezes. And last year, in April 2025, Coloso had to spend a night in the fields with family and community members, burning fires during an unseasonal freeze to save the berry crop from being completely lost.

“We ended up not losing all of it, which was lucky, and we’re thankful,” Coloso said.

Instead of another dramatic scramble to save the blueberries, Coloso is looking into methods to stop them from freezing in the future. What looks to be the most effective method, a type of misting irrigation system that keeps the flowers wet to prevent them from freezing, is too expensive.

“While there’s some research that supports this overnight spraying, I don’t think that’s going to be possible for us,” Coloso said.

So instead, candles might be the solution.

The candles Coloso is talking about are not ordinary candles but special ones made to heat fields, sometimes used by citrus growers. Although they’ll cost a lot, they won’t be nearly as much as an irrigation system.

“You could light the candles, and they’ll burn throughout the whole night,” she said. “I’m thinking we’d maybe need 1,000 or more. The main thing is, I’m going to need to figure out what to do for these cold nights, because that increased variability in temperature is what’s really going to impact us.”

Small farmers feel the effects

The decline of small farms in the Shenandoah Valley is a long-standing trend, but climate change might have exacerbated it. The costly interventions farmers must take to protect crops and animals from extreme weather are making it more expensive to be a farmer.

JMU Professor of Integrated Sciences and Technology Jennifer Coffman said that these climate events — and the costs associated with them — are both a burden on farmers and a stumbling block for people considering farming.

This is in addition to the cost of land, which rises every year.

Farmers who may have considered themselves “fiercely independent” 15 years ago are now increasingly seeking grant money to help them implement some of the environmental safeguards that they need, Coffman said.

“There are trade-offs,” she said. “In general, farmers want to protect their land because productive land is the basis of their entire livelihood. It often doesn’t take much convincing when those efforts are subsidized, but farmers will want to know what the benefit is to them and their land.”

Other farmers are turning to alternative forms of farming, such as hydroponics, a method that is becoming increasingly popular as water availability becomes more uncertain. Farmers are also diversifying their production, unable to rely on just one crop, Coffman said.

“Many local, small-scale farmers diversify their production, so if something goes awry with some of their crops, they have others on which they can rely, and, depending on production methods, can adjust a little during growing seasons to compensate for losses,” she said. “I have spoken with loads of farmers who tell stories about summers where the tomatoes burst because of too much rainfall, the greens burned under intense sun and high temperatures.”

Coffman’s Local Agriculture class at JMU is intended for people who want to learn about local small farms, and even for those who want to practice it themselves. But new farms often fail, she said, because people can’t afford to continue running them. And climate change only adds to this problem.

“Farmers are pretty good at slightly manipulating the small-scale ecosystems on which they operate,” Coffman said. “But they can only do so much. If weather patterns change dramatically, that adds a burden, and they have to counter with other technology.”

Prepared for whatever comes

Not all farms have been in the same families for generations. Some newer farmers have designed their operations with the environment in mind from the beginning, hoping for longevity by leaving a smaller footprint on the earth.

After working with an environmental NGO in Ethiopia, which is more vulnerable to climate impacts than the U.S., the Shenk family decided to raise Boer goats when they came home. Their Rockingham County farm, “Home Again Farm,” was designed to minimize water use and prioritize native plants.

“It’s much easier to raise goats on marginal, rocky land. Goats are a pretty hardy animal,” said Pam Shenk. “They don’t need a whole lot of water to begin with, but the watering system is a cost-share program with NCRS. This allows us to do rotational grazing. If there’s an unusual dry year, if there’s a wet year, we can control the livestock better.”

The cost-share program with the Natural Resources Conservation Service has helped the Shenks afford the farm, though the government shutdown in the fall of 2025 delayed some of their payments. In return for the money, the Shenks take care of the land, participating in stream restoration and tree-planting projects. Their goats can even graze on a part of the forested land, Shenk said.

The Shenks use an irrigation system to water their goats, rotating them among different fields so that no section of the land is overgrazed. They also prioritize keeping the goats out of the nearby creek to reduce water pollution.

Raising goats uses less water than raising cattle, and goats can thrive in more arid climates, which is good for drought years, Shenk said.

“You can’t count on the same thing happening year after year over time,” Shenk said. “So we just kind of set ourselves up to be ready for whatever comes. Part of being climate-resilient is knowing the climate is much less predictable. Patterns that people have relied on for years don’t exist anymore.”

On older farms, adaptations have changed established ways of growing plants and raising livestock. Like the Shenks, Peg Davis has designed her Augusta County farm around an irrigation system she can control instead of relying on unpredictable rainfall.

Peg Davis, a Staunton farmer’s market regular, was the subject of a documentary shot in 2023, titled “Peg O’ my Heart,” in a nod to the heirloom tomato variety she bred and named after herself. But the tomatoes she grows don’t come straight from the ground. With the water table in Augusta County now 18 feet lower than it was 20 years ago due to annual droughts, the lifelong farmer has had to become an inventor, too.

“I’m in a unique position where I’ve lived in the same place for 50 years,” she said. “It used to be, it would rain almost every afternoon [in summer], a big thunderstorm, right around 3 o’clock. Now you can go from May to September with no rain. We have to wait for the aftermath of a hurricane to bring moisture to the valley.”

Unable to rely on dwindling groundwater to keep her tomato, kale, broccoli, and lettuce plants watered, she created an irrigation system within a hoop house that she calls the SIP system. It uses double buckets and a “wicking cup” to provide water to the plants. A solar-powered aeration system adds oxygen. The goal of the SIP system is to keep it as close to nature as possible, without chemicals or artificial heat. The setup also means Davis can control many aspects of how her plants grow.

“When we have heat, it’s excessive heat. Wind is excessive wind, rain is excessive rain, cold is excessive cold. Climate change is climate chaos,” she said. “Being able to grow in a controlled environment is a big advantage.”

She used to have to water each of the 90 plant buckets every day. Now she uses a trough system that her son, Daniel, built in 2016, which makes for much less watering.

There are even live fish in every bucket, which have a sort of symbiotic relationship with the plants — they eat any algae that grows in the water, and their waste fertilizes the plants even more.

She doesn’t know exactly how much all this costs. But she knows that it’s worth it.

“I grow fabulous vegetables this way,” she said. “If I were trying to grow in the ground, it would not be like this.”

Using animals to help her farming is not new to Davis, who has “rewilded” the forest around her farmhouse with the help of a herd of cows. The cows eat the underbrush and thistles that grow around the property, allowing trees to get enough sunlight to sprout.

Davis has farmed this land, which she bought when she was in her 20s, for more than 50 years. It was a struggle, she said, to afford it while raising her children. But with land prices having gone up since then, she said she is glad her children will be able to inherit it.

“They’re going to be blessed,” Davis said. “Unlike other kids, who have to buy land.”

Because she knows how hard it is for people to go into farming amid high costs and a changing planet, she is now using her experience and position at the farmer’s market to try to give others the same chance she had.

“When we have a young couple starting to farm, we try to give them a chance,” she said. “Even if it’s on one acre.”