CENTRAL LAKE: Weather has damaged much of the family orchards crop for the third time in five years. The blow landed on a farm and an industry already squeezed by the Trump administration’s changes to government services, immigration and trade policies.

King Orchards’ harvest crew from Guatemala arrived in mid-July, short-handed and weeks late after delays in securing the H-2A seasonal farmworker visas they rely on each year. They paid more to ship fresh cherries by private carrier after a US Postal Service reorganisation left fresh fruit sitting a bit too long.

A US Department of Agriculture grant request for funding a cold-storage unit remained in limbo, as Washington cut spending on farm programmes and agricultural research. And Jack King, Juliettes brother and the farm’s agronomist, kept searching for fertilizer cheap enough to haul and untouched by President Donald Trump’s trade wars.

“It all slows us down,” King McAvoy, the farm’s business manager, said during a brief pause in July’s harried harvest. Farmers in the hills near Grand Traverse Bay, where the fruit of their labor has filled pies and fed generations, said they are caught in the crosshairs of Trump’s reshaping of government, with sharp cuts and increasing delays hitting the $227 million US tart cherry industry hard. From weather, plant disease and pest woes, USDA forecast Michigan will lose 41pc of its tart cherry crop this year, compared to 2024. Northwest Michigan, where the King farm is located, faces the steepest drop about 70pc, according to the Cherry Industry Administrative Board.

After the April freeze, King McAvoy’s phone rang. It was her friend and fellow grower, Emily Miezio, in Suttons Bay, Michigan. “What are you seeing?” Juliette stared at the trees. “I’m not sure. But it’s not good.” South of the Kings, the cold snap left farmer Don Gallagher’s trees sparse. “We can grow leaves,” he said, as his family hunted for fruit in the branches. “We just can’t grow cherries.”

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2025