Frost Risk and Market Ripples: 2025 Apricot Stress in Malatya

A closer look at Turkey’s 2025 growing season reveals a troubling trend: persistent cold, lingering wet conditions, and rising agronomic volatility. These stressors have left their mark on multiple crops, but nowhere more critically than in Malatya, the country’s apricot heartland. Malatya accounts for nearly 80% of Turkey’s apricot production and dominates the global dried apricot export market. Yet, this spring, it has been locked into a pattern of temperature-driven stress that now threatens its harvest.

Turkey’s 2025 season began with persistently cold and wet risk days, particularly in February, March, and April. These systemic trends set the stage for local crop stress in key regions like Malatya.

The Helios platform’s national risk dashboard paints a stark picture: from late winter through early spring, an unusually high share of days were flagged for cold stress, with spikes in both wet and dry days alternating through critical development periods. For apricot producers in Malatya, the timing couldn’t have been worse. The cold risk surged just as the trees were approaching flowering, a stage highly vulnerable to sub-zero temperatures. When these events occur, they can cause direct damage to flower buds, limit pollination, and result in lower fruit set.

Zooming in on the region, Helios data show that Malatya experienced 10 days with temperatures below freezing in early spring, a 115% increase compared to historical norms. That’s more than double the usual number of frost days for this time of year. Combined with overall cooler-than-normal average temperatures, this extended cold exposure delayed bloom in many orchards, and in some cases, exposed late flowers to repeat frost damage. The platform’s real-time temperature monitoring indicated that the risk was not isolated to elevation or microclimates but widespread across the production region.

Frequent freezes in March and April 2025 exposed Malatya apricots to critical cold stress during bloom.

Growers are already reporting uneven bloom, poor fruit set, and a higher incidence of bud drop than in previous years. While official crop loss estimates are still pending, local agricultural cooperatives have warned of yield reductions that could reach 30–60%, particularly in lower-lying orchards where cold air tends to settle. Industry observers are also preparing for tightening supply in the dried apricot export market, with effects likely to ripple through global pricing by Q3.

The Helios platform forecasted such conditions and then flagged them in real time as they developed, comparing observed temperatures against local climatological norms and highlighting above-average frost risk weeks before bloom reached its peak. For procurement teams, this level of visibility provides a critical edge: the ability to identify operational disruptions before harvest reports arrive, and to adjust sourcing expectations and timelines accordingly.

Malatya’s 2025 apricot season is more than a local anomaly. It is a clear signal that sub-seasonal climate risk is now a core supply chain concern. The ability to monitor, interpret, and act on early weather signals—especially in high-value specialty crops—may define not only profitability, but long-term market stability in a changing climate.