Checking in on Washington Apples
Checking in on
Visiting my local grocer the other day I was struck by the dwindling selection of apples. Of course this is the very end of last year’s crop but rest assured the new crop is coming according to Rebecca Baerveldt, Export Manager for the Washington Apple Commission.
BAERVELDT: Right now what we’re looking at from an initial estimate is that the crop size is going to be down about 2% from the current season, coming in a 107 million bushel boxes so that’s certainly good news for our growers.
A bit smaller crop will help boost prices for growers. It is still a bit early to pick but very shortly we should start seeing some action on early Golden’s.
BAERVELDT: I’m hearing that the fruit size is going to be much better across the entire manifest. This last season we had a lot of small size fruit which created some challenges for our packing and marketing side of the equation because most of the domestic retailers prefer a larger (size).
And as I mentioned the retailers are finishing up with some good fruit at the market and Baerveldt says there will be plenty to go around.
BAERVELDT: Again we’re going to have plenty of product to keep all of the customers happy coming into the new season. I know in our overseas markets we’ve still got strong demand from our late season markets to finish up the crop.
That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.
