The Good, Bad & the Ugly

Good, Bad & Ugly. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

This was an incredible year for cherries. You could have grown cherries on the side of a fence post and the weather cooperated which led to one big crop according to BJ Thurlby with NW Cherries.

THURLBY: Well we thought originally it was 18.5 and now we’ve been reconciling it. We got all of our numbers in from the state inspection service which are the final, final numbers and we’ve been reconciling the back numbers from Oregon, Utah and Idaho, Montana and sure enough, we hit 20 million boxes this year so compared to last year’s 9 million boxes so we more than doubled our crop in one year.

While that sounds very positive and everyone should be congratulated, that seemed to be the case in all growing areas of the world.

THURLBY: This year every production region in the world that was in the same timing that we were set a full, full crop. And there was really no damage. You look at Turkey and they had a record crop this year, Poland had a record crop, Michigan had a record crop, the Northwest had a record crop, California had a record crop.

Normally you will have a certain amount of attrition due to weather or some other issue and that resulted in a worldwide glut of cherries.

THURLBY: It’s something that we just don’t usually see. Another anomaly that just made for a much tougher road thrown on top of this economy but having all that fruit out there just really makes for a tough haul on the world market. I’m hearing the same things out of Turkey that I’m hearing from my growers up here.

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