Halfway Done

Halfway Done. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The 2009 apple harvest is nearing the halfway point and so far it has been a good year for apples according to Bruce Grim, Executive Director of the Washington State Horticultural Association. But he also says this isn’t your grand-dad’s harvest.

GRIM: Well we are as you’ve correctly said near the mid-point of harvest. Harvest is an awful lot different, I’m not telling growers anything they don’t already know but it sure has a lot different feel to it than it did 10-15 years ago when we were growing and having to harvest so many Red Delicious in a rather compressed time frame.

Washington’s apple crop used to be predominately Red Delicious and while there is still a significant harvest of Red’s there are a great deal of other varieties now.

GRIM: Red harvest again is roughly 30-million boxes which is probably down from nearly double that number some years ago and then we have some Jonagold, we have some Honeycrips, we have some Braeburn. We have a bunch of other little things Fuji’s and Granny’s and it seems like those come off some early, some late and so harvest just has a different feel to it.

Grim says growers seemed to do a better job on the front side of harvest.

GRIM: I think growers have gone back this year to what they had done several years prior to last year and that was doing a very effective job of sorting their crop in the field.

More on the 2009 harvest with Bruce Grim tomorrow.

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