What’s a Georgian summer without peaches? Not so sweet.

Darkness has fallen over the cobbler’s shop. You can hardly find a peach.

A somewhat warm winter, followed by a string of hard frosts in March, has devastated Georgia’s peach crop. Some hopeful state officials only estimate that 10 percent of the harvest survived. But out in the field, the prospects look even worse.

“If we made 2 percent of a crop, I’d be surprised,” he said Jeff Cook, a University of Georgia Cooperative Extension Coordinator who helped prepare an application for federal aid. Last week, the United States Department of Agriculture granted, declaring 18 counties of Georgia natural disaster areas and another 38 counties eligible for federal loans. The cost to the state, including lost jobs and peach sales, could be as high as $200 million, according to Cook.

In a state where eating a peach over the kitchen counter is a birthright, cobbler recipes are passed down through the generations and a mind-boggling number streets in Atlanta Called Peachtree, a summer without peaches is unfathomable.

There is little relief in the orchards of neighboring South Carolina, which grows more than twice as many peaches as Georgia but has lost 75 percent or more of this year’s crop.

“It’s heartbreaking,” says Lanier Pearson, whose family grows peaches 1,400 acres in Fort Valley, Ga. “We have never seen anything like it. Even my father-in-law, who is in his 70s and has been a farmer all his life, cannot remember a year so badly.”

The few peaches available at Atlanta farmers’ markets cost nearly double what they did last year. Organic peaches sell for nearly $2 each. The local fruit is so scarce that some grocery stores in Georgia only offer California peaches, which is like playing “Dear Carolineat Yankee Stadium.

While California and South Carolina grow far more peaches, the loyalty to the Georgia peach is strong. Stephen Satterfield, the chef of Miller Union in Atlanta, has no intention of replenishing its precious lot of only two boxes a week with peaches from another state.

Instead, he builds recipes around the deficit. Claudia V. Martinez, the restaurant’s pastry chef, slices peaches extra thin before topping them with cornmeal cake and buttermilk ice cream. Tomatoes and cucumbers play supporting roles in a peach salad with lemon ricotta, herbs and crunchy granola. The bartender wonders how use peach pits for non-alcoholic cocktails.

There is one bright spot in an otherwise difficult year for southern peaches. “I will say that the little bit that is available really shines,” said Mr Satterfield.

Some chefs just give up. Erika Council, who runs a breakfast restaurant in Atlanta, called Bomb Cookies, grew up eating and cooking with southern peaches. Her grandmother is Mildred Council, better known as Mama Dip, who opened a popular restaurant in Chapel Hill, NC, and went on to write two cookbooks.

Mrs. Council makes jam with pineapple or cantaloupe instead of peaches, and customers will have to wait until next year for her Peach Reaper sauce, made with Georgia peaches and Carolina Reaper Peppers.

Peach prices, she said, “are so outrageously high that I should be using canned or frozen, and I’m not going to.”

In a pinch, some Georgia peach purists will turn to South Carolina, which is second only to California in peach production. (For the record, in 2022, California grew 475,000 tons of peaches, dwarfing South Carolina’s 67,400 tons and Georgia’s 24,800 tons.)

In the two southern states, a similar terroir and long, hot summer days produce complex, sweet, and fragrant fruits. Many of the cultivated varieties are also the same. Sometimes even the most practiced peach-eating Southerner can’t tell the difference.

Despite a rivalry as to whose taste is better, the states are united when it comes to fending off the peaches from the north or west. “We have some friendly competition, but we want people to buy peaches from Southeast Asia,” said Eva Moore, communications director for the South Carolina Department of Agriculture.

The pain of the South is also felt in New Englandwhere trees have weathered weather swings, including a blossom-killing cold snap in February that brought temperatures below zero.

“I don’t think there’s a peach in New England,” he said Joe Czajkowskiwho has several acres of fruit trees on his farm in Hadley, Massachusetts.

Between there and the south, however, lies a success story: New Jersey, where this summer’s peach crop is amazing. The weather has been perfect, with no excessive rain that can make peaches mushy, said Pegi Adam of the New Jersey Peach Promotion Council.

“But,” she said, “you shouldn’t say that the South’s loss is Jersey’s gain.”

California is also experiencing a particularly good year. “We were lucky,” said Chelsea Ketelsen, whose family runs HMC farms, south of Fresno. “We’ve had a cooler summer than usual, so we have higher sugars than usual.”

Like other California ranches, HMC is doing its best to fill the national gaps left by poor southern supply. And while Ms. Ketelsen has nothing but respect for supporters of the Georgia Peach, she urges them to take a chance.

“If you have to settle for California,” she said, “this is the year to do it.”

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