Those are Some Cherries!

Those are Some Cherries! I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

If you have been to the grocery store lately you have probably seen some really great looking and tasting NW cherries. According to BJ Thurlby with Northwest Cherries so far this has been a great cherry season.

THURLBY: The reality is I think we are coming up on 10 million boxes shipped and we’ve got probably another 7 to 10 but probably closer to 8 (million) is my guess, boxes left to go hopefully in the next month and a half and that’s one of our big hopes is that the back end of this thing doesn’t converge kind of like the middle of the crop did.

This cherry season has been a long time coming.

THURLBY: There’s no one who is negative. Everyone is saying the fruit looks great, the pricing is the best they’ve seen in a lot of years, the display size is now probably the biggest we’ve seen it here over the last 2 weeks and sales have been good. That’s all good news, the challenge is can we continue to move the back end of this crop.

Cherry size has been great and to the point where there is still considerable fruit being left behind that is not big enough and Thurlby says even with that:

THURLBY: We’ve had daily record shipments now for 15 days straight so the shipments have been real strong. The challenge out there has been, we’ve had people in Wapato harvesting at the same time people in Omak we’re harvesting and out Bing crop really came in all at the same time this year.

Tomorrow we look at promotion of the crop and labor issues for the 2009 cherry season.

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