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Climate change is coming for your restaurant bill. A late freeze this April has had lasting effects on produce into the fall.
“The farmer is the first person to feel the impacts of climate change,” said Christa Barfield, founder and CEO of FarmerJawn. “It trickles down to the consumer later on.”
The spring freeze hit Pennsylvania’s orchard and fruit farmers particularly hard.
“Their blooms were already on their trees, and they lost pretty much every one of them,” Barfield explained. “Most farmers in the Northeast said that they lost about 70% of their crop, and that is financially devastating.”
The event caused major damage on apples, plums, peaches, kumquats and other tree-born fruits. Some Pennsylvania apple orchards have even had to cancel their apple-picking season or source from Midwest and Western states.
“Restaurateurs are buying things from further away,” Barfield said. “Even the distribution channels that exist, those food distributors are getting fruit from much further away as well. So in California, we’re shipping fruit from over 3,000 miles, or even outside of the country.”
Shipping, of course, can get pricey. Not only are diesel costs on the rise, but tariffs can come into play.
According to Shan Kumar, assistant professor of tree fruit at Penn State Extension‘s College of Agricultural Sciences, weather patterns are becoming increasingly extreme.
“Everywhere we have seen historic new trends,” Kumar told Pittsburg’s Public Source. “It’s harder to do agriculture because of climate change, that’s just a fact that we’re all living with.”
He noted that last April’s freeze kicked his fructification research “into high gear.”
This October, Barfield helped lead a roundtable with the James Beard Foundation, U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean, as well as restaurant owners, chefs and farmers across Pennsylvania to tackle the problem. Local Philly restaurateurs like Christina Rodriguez from South Philly Barbacoa and Ellen Yin from High Street Hospitality Group were present.
“Farms can’t exist without restaurants, and vice versa,” said Anne McBride, vice president of impact at the James Beard Foundation.
The idea of the roundtable was to connect those in food, farming and hospitality to lawmakers, and advocate for legislation and programs that help regenerative agriculture and combat climate change.
“Both farming and the restaurant industry function on very, very small margins,” McBride said. “The average margin of an independent restaurant is 3 to 5%, and that’s in a good year.”
Higher prices on produce eat into that profit margin, which can make it harder to absorb any other business hurdles.
“Seeing increased prices on menus, it is not because chefs or farmers are getting any richer,” she added. “These are two industries that are doing it out of passion, because if they were in it for the money, they would do anything but farming or owning independent restaurants.”
Despite increasingly unpredictable weather, Barfield said she believes there are solutions — one of which is adjusting to more resilient crops.
“We are starting to see our agricultural zones change from 7a to now 7b, and who knows where it’s going to go,” she said. “So we want to help restaurants be able to prepare their customer base for the changes and help them to truly eat in season.”
This also will involve educating the public on what they should expect to be available.
“Teaching people about the word varieties is really key,” Barfield said. “Helping them understand that for every tomato, there are 1,000s of varieties, some that grow better in different climates. Our goal is to be able to get some of those seeds from the different climates where we can’t normally get them and bring them here.”
In addition, McBride is advocating for restaurants to connect more with farmers when they are menu planning. And not just on the phone. She believes that everyone should visit the outdoor spaces where their food comes from.
“Both communities work 16-hour days alone in their respective area,” McBride said. “Seeing the ingredient growing, seeing an ingredient they might be familiar with in July, and they’re suddenly seeing it in early October — they’re thinking about it differently.”
Both McBride and Barfield say that the one of the best things to do on the consumer end, is to support local farmers.
“Shop your farmer first, and that’s really what it comes down to,” Barfield said. “Shop restaurants that focus on relationships with farmers.”
“Go to the farmers market. Visit farms. Go to farm stands, not just pumpkin patches or apple pickups,” McBride said. She pointed to events like Phoenixville’s Good Food Fest, which is billed as the largest single-day outdoor food festival in Pennsylvania. “Supporting local farms as year round as possible is critical.”
