12/23/08 Talking China & Cherries

Talking China & Cherries. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. China is a big player in just about everything including agriculture. BJ Thurlby with NW Cherries says we need to keep an eye out on our export markets. THURLBY: China is really critical to us because the one thing that we have in our industry here in the cherry business is we have a proximity to the Pacific Rim which is a real strong export market for us all the way across and it's kind of our ace-in-the-hole because these other countries like Turkey, Iran, Poland, Ukraine there not delivering a lot of cherries there and they're not going to. Thurlby and some other took a trip into China a couple of years ago and were astounded by some figures provided. THURLBY: FAO data says they produce 22-thousand tons of sweet cherries a year. All of them are consumed pretty much domestically. This government official provided us with data that the actually produced 174-thousand tons. According to this government official and this is where it gets hazy and when you are dealing with China a lot of stuff is, currently 400-thousand acres of cherries in production. And they are saying they are going to have 1-million acres planted within the next 5 years. Fortunately he says their ag operations are not up to our standards. THURLBY: Their trees are very low in their yields, about 1.5 tons per acre. They have no hydro-cooling, no sorting, no modernized technology lines. They're picked early for purposes of shipping early, they put them in Styrofoam boxes and drop cold towel over them. The Styrofoam boxes are just loaded onto a truck; usually a flatbed truck, no cooling. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.