Finishing Up the Apple Crop

Finishing Up the Apple Crop. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The cold weather came in in a hurry last week and it had apple producers scrambling to get the last of the Fuji and Cripp’s Pink or Pink Lady apples off the trees. The race was on and according to Alan Taylor with Pink Lady America, it appears the producers won.

TAYLOR: First of all we started out with the rain about three weeks ago and that slowed up the harvest of Pink Lady’s and also I think some Fuji’s and that stopped and now we had the cold spell hit but I think that probably would be safe to say that we have most all of the crop in the barn. I’ve seen numbers of 4.2 million as of last week and I think another total of about a quarter million boxes shipped so far including the earlier varieties.

Not all of the apples did get picked but the number was relatively low. Taylor says some producers are still trying to finish up.

TAYLOR: I did see some folks out in one orchard that were attempting to pick a few that were left but again there weren’t very many left on the trees. Al I can do is go back to the second year that we had volume back in 2002 and it was Halloween and we had six degreased the record for the date was twelve and it made it through the first night and the next night it was down to six again and that cooked them.

Different apple varieties can tolerate freezing temperatures better than others but Pink Lady’s are not one of them. Even so, with a little over 4.2 million, Taylor says this was a good year.

TAYLOR: That would still be a record over what we had just this last season which came up very close to 4 million.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.