Althugh there are no official estimates yet on crop loss, a severe outbreak of late blight fungus in tomatoes, first noted in June, is sweeping through farms and gardens in the Northeast.
John Mishanec, an educator with the integrated pest management program at Cornell University, compared the highly contagious and incurable disease to a “nuclear explosion” in the region’s tomato crop. “And unless the weather changes, it’s going to get worse,” he said.
Consumers, he and others said, must be prepared to pay high prices to support local agriculture this summer.
The Hudson Valley region of New York, where the disease has jumped from tomatoes to potatoes and is wreaking havoc in both, has already experienced widespread crop loss. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Amy Hepworth, a seventh-generation farmer who is raising 20 acres of organic tomatoes in Ulster County, N.Y., for customers that include Whole Foods and the Park Slope Food Co-op. On July 25, she was burning affected plants to try to prevent the fungus’s spores from spreading farther into her fields.
