Hort Show

Hort Show. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The 2012 Hort Convention and Expo is underway at the Yakima Convention Center through today. The last two years have been good for the tree fruit industry and Bruce Grim, executive director of the Washington State Horticulture Association talks about how that may affect the next few years down the road.

GRIM: First of all it’s going to mean expectations are going to be off the charts in the grower community. Again this last year we had some challenges. We had a very, very large crop and return there were probably not what we would have liked to have seen in the heavy part of the shipping season so that was not so great but even with a record pear crop last year the numbers were not bad. We have a smaller pear crop this year so again I think we’re looking at near record prices on pears season to date, knock on wood.

Obviously they hope those prices continue.

GRIM: The short crop in the east. The short crops in the northern hemisphere in Europe. Those have all fueled great demand for our product at this point and I see last week again we shipped right at 2.8 million boxes so very good shipping weeks back-to-back and I think it will continue that way as the season goes on. But again, expectations will be the first thing that will continue to remain very high.

Turn out for this years event has been very good and of course there is a lot of optimism and loads of smiles on growers faces.

GRIM: It’s fun to go up and down the aisles here at the convention and see so many happy people and everybody’s going well what about next year - well this industry kind of worries about one year at a time.

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