Grand Haven Township resident Howard Behm, owner of Behm Blueberry Farms Inc., said that there are different varieties of blueberry and depending on the stage they are at during a cold snap, the weather can affect them more or less.
"There is one variety that sustained some damage that we have noticed," Behm said. "It is a Rubel variety that looks like it was hit."
Aside from this variety, he said there is going to be a wait and see approach that is taken to see if what other problems there are for this year's blueberry crop.
"It is going to take time to see if there is any damage," Behm said, adding that there are things that might not be visible several days after a cold spell that could pop up several weeks later.
Other local farmers are also noticing a slight impact due to the cold weather. Ken Reenders, co-owner of Reenders Blueberry Farm in West Olive, said he doesn't think the recent cold weather will have a major impact on the business, however, like Behm, there was some damage to certain blueberry varieties.
"Some of the fields had some loss," he said, adding that it all had to due with the timing of the plants flowering and how they'd be impacted by colder weather.
"If we'd been 10 days later, it would have been a lot worse," Reenders said, referencing the maturity of certain blueberries.
He also said that the blueberry farmers weren't hit quite as bad as other fruit farmers in the state.
"We didn't get hit as hard as the cherry people or the apple people," Reenders said.
Though this year hasn't been bad for them, Reenders does recall a time when weather hasn't been so kind to he and other local blueberry farmers. He said nearly 20 years ago, there was a time when they lost nearly 66 percent of the crop due to damage from the weather.
While there is some damage to certain varieties, experts in the agriculture field believe there will be are expecting typical returns on the crops this year.
"We are expecting to have a normal crop," said Dr. Carlos Garcia Salazar, Ottawa County small fruit educator at Michigan State University Extension. "About the same amount of volume for this state."
While he had no specific data regarding the total amounts of berries harvested in the Ottawa County, he did say numbers should be similar to those found in Michigan during last year's harvest. During this time, the state harvested 99 million pounds of blueberries.
Salazar also said he didn't think the weather would have a huge impact on the amount of berries harvested this year. When this late winter/early spring frost took place, he said that most of the local blueberry farmers were able to turn on their irrigation and frost protection systems to prevent significant damage to the blueberry crop.
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