Getting Ready For Apples

Getting Ready for Apples. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Todd Fryhover with the Washington Apple Commission is excited about this year’s apple crop. It promises to be another good one but estimates show a bit smaller crop unlike other apple growing states.

FRYHOVER: New York was talking about a crop that was about 26 and a half million cartons which is a normal crop for them. The one place that was having an increase was Michigan. Michigan was going up from 17 million boxes to almost 25 so there is a big increase going on in that particular what they call the Midwest region as far as crop volumes go.

Overall for the U.S. Fryhover says it will be a good crop.

FRYHOVER: But overall in general the USDA crop report came out at 240 million and that includes processors and we revised down that estimate for the U.S. crop to 232 million so we’re actually going to have our 11^th largest crop as a U.S. entity coming up this year.

There was a report last week of a fairly large orchard in the Midwest being decimated by a tornado but Fryhover says even something like that would be hard pressed to ruin this years’ crop.

FRYHOVER: You know we’re so diversified from Oroville all the way down to the Oregon border that it’s really hard for us to get a crop failure. Certainly areas or pockets can receive damage and God forbid we don’t want to see any one grower have an issue but as an industry there’s always places that make up for those types of activities.

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