2015 Soft Fruit

2015 Soft Fruit. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

We can now look at the 2015 soft fruit harvest in the rear view mirror and get a better idea how all the factors came together. BJ Thurlby, president of the Washington State Fruit Commission talks about the season.

THURLBY: This summer, indicative of everything we’ve seen, it benign the hottest summer on record which of course beat the record from last year which was the hottest summer on record. The soft fruit season finished up very early this year and we saw our last shipments leave the industry on the 26th of September which I can’t even remember a year we didn’t have peaches and nectarines being shipped into October.

He says that was also in part to a very favorable market.

THURLBY: Overall I think the growers that are out there had a pretty good year. We saw some really nice demand pop up across the northwest, not just here in Seattle and Portland but also we saw some great ads and promotions done up in Canada and then some of our big retailers across the country supported us outside the northwest which really helped.

And he takes a look at some numbers.

THURLBY: I think we’re going to end up with about 9000 tons of peaches, a similar number for nectarines with an average harvest for apricots this year, about 47-hundred tons which is right in line where the average has been the last five years. So overall it’s been a good year for soft fruit.

Water actually didn’t seem to play as much a part in the soft fruit season as it could have been.

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