I will continue on from where I left off.
We market our products through two primary channels: wholesale, with marketing and distribution through major and minor grocery chains, accounts for about 75% of our sales; and retail, through our farm market and farmers' markets in Nova Scotia, makes up the remaining 25%. Geographically, we sell to Atlantic Canada, to Ontario wholesale clients, and to a major U.S. distributor.
We employ over 90 full-time and part-time personnel throughout the year to staff our processing, warehousing and distribution operations. To give you an idea, gross sales range from $6.5 million to $7.5 million.
Over the last couple of years, we've experienced several economic threatening events. In 2018, there was a devastating late frost in our valley, something we've never seen before. In 2019, we had a very cold, wet spring that put stress on our trees, which were already in shock from the 2018 frost. In September 2019, hurricane Dorian took 30% to 40% of our crop off the trees and also left a lot of our crop damaged on the trees.
I'm not here to complain today, but just to give you a feel for the situation on our farm and other farms in our area.
We look at things from a positive sense and try to work with adverse conditions. An example of that would be the hurricane losses we incurred. We found a way to make up some of that loss through our vertically integrated operation by making cider out of windfall apples. We called this “Hurrican”. It was put in a can, not in a bottle. It became an instant success because our customers in the Halifax and metro regions were all affected by this hurricane. They lost power for over a week, and out of sympathy we had tremendous success out of a terrible, devastating hurricane to our trees.
Moving forward very quickly to 2020, COVID arrived in March, as we all know. I'm going to state very quickly some of the ongoing things that are happening, or what's happened. As a result of COVID, we suddenly lost several of our employees for various reasons, especially on the retail side, mostly from fear of catching it, contact with customers and so on. We've had to cut our hours of operation to cope. Three of our farm markets we attend all closed down, which is fairly significant for us.
We took that sad scenario, and we moved quickly to online sales. We were able to capture some of that business. However, the future of our farm markets is up in the air, and we're not sure what this will mean as we move forward into our busy season. It's starting now. It's going to ramp up in August, and be in full swing in September and October.
The online sales required a different skill set, and we had to hire several more people to be able to cope with the new challenges of our business.
Along with all that happening we had to keep up with all the current regulations and new things happening, making sure we protect our employees, making huge changes to our processing or packing line to be able to keep distance and to keep some kind of flow. It has proved very stressful and very time-consuming from a management point.
We've gone through that. I will add that we were able to get our seasonal workers in. I thank the government very much for stepping up and helping us in various ways to get them here, but they came in a month late. In our business, the tree fruit business, the trees move along. As the season progressed, we missed a lot of events as far as what we needed to do in our orchards was concerned, but—