AUBURN — Irene’s wind and rain took its toll on Maine’s corn and apple crops, tipping over stalks of corn and young apple trees and leaving the ground littered with rain-sodden food.

“We can’t give you a percentage right now, but of course (damage) is higher than we’d like it to be,” said Peter Ricker, whose family runs one of Maine’s biggest apple-growing operations, including Wallingford’s in Auburn and Ricker Hill in Turner. “A significant portion of the crop was lost to the storm.”

It had been shaping up to be a strong year.

“We were looking to have a heavy, heavy crop,” Ricker said.

Instead, bunches of young trees with narrow trunks sat toppled like dominoes at Wallingford’s on Monday.

It’s a scene found around Maine as farmers walked their fields and orchards, said Greg Koller, who runs Monmouth’s Highmoor Farm. The farm is operated by the University of Maine Cooperative Extension and Maine Agricultural & Forestry Experiment Station.

Like Ricker, he saw toppled trees, Monday, along with some corn, he said.

However, the problem worsened as you neared Irene’s rain-soaked track, he said. In places like Oxford County, which had some of the state’s highest rainfall totals, he expected the soft ground to weaken the crops even more, making them easier to fall.

“The trees and the corn loosen up,” he said.

At Bell Farms in Auburn, work was already under way Monday to examine the corn crop. Some fields looked untouched. Others looked like they’d been stomped by giants.

“We’ve got to assess and see if it can be harvested,” David Bell said Monday morning. There may be methods or machines that could do the work, he said. If not, the corn would be plowed into the soil.

The storm could have been worse. Though the nearby Androscoggin River is high, it did not jump the banks and flood his potato fields. That would have been devastating, he said.

It’s too soon to guess the total damage, he said

Not everyone experienced such losses, though.

At Packard Littlefield Farm in Lisbon, the storm littered the area with branches and knocked over several sunflowers but ruined little else, leaving the corn standing and the other crops flourishing.

“I think we’re more afraid of trees blowing over and taking down electrical wires,” farmer Ella Mae Packard said. But her house, like the fields, survived without scars.

In part, it was a fact of what she was growing. Her biggest crop, hay, was already cut and stored off the ground before the storm hit. 

A wide variety of other foods are grown at the farm, she said. She leases 31 acres to the New Americans Sustainable Agriculture Program, which serves many Lewiston-Auburn immigrants. Some of the foods are sold at the weekly farmers market in Lewiston’s Kennedy Park.

“Some of the people have already been down here this morning,” Packard said.

No one is complaining about damage, she said.

Like Packard with her hay, Ricker had tried to pick his apples before the wind blew through.

“This hit us about two weeks before apples were ready,” he said. “There wasn’t much we could do.”

In most cases, the apples that were blown onto the ground will stay there, he said. They cannot be sold as whole apples and they weren’t ripe enough to be used as juice.

The scene was replicated among the Ricker’s operations in Bridgton, Harrison, Buckfield and Hebron.

“Our Hebron farm was hit especially hard,” Ricker said.

Another problem among apple growers is that the wind causes the apples to bruise while still on the tree.

“The apples are hitting each other,” Koller said.

He was unsure what assistance might become available to farmers who experienced losses due to the storm. Some aid might come to farmers with federal crop insurance.

For Ricker, it’s the second disappointing season in a row.

Last year also looked to be an exceptional year until a hailstorm hit.

“We lost probably a third to half our acreage to hail,” Ricker said.

He takes this year’s loss in stride. 

“It’s part of the game you play,” he said. “We have to take that into the consideration on the cost of our apples. You survive somehow.”

Tori Jackson, Extension educator for agriculture and natural resources, said some farmers might suffer a second hit from Irene in the form of more disease and more insect problems. She said such storms can spread fungus, like late blight, and crop-harming insects, like corn ear worm.

Just the same, Jackson said, much of Maine’s farm produce was not affected by the storm. “There’s a great harvest out there,” she said, later adding, “Keep visiting your farm stands.”

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