2008 Crops in the Rear View Part 2

2008 Crops in the Rear View. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Bruce Grimm, Executive Director of the Washington State Horticultural Association spent some time at this year’s annual conference discussing how things have been shaping up over the past several years.

GRIMM: What we started the 2008 crop with was very high pricing. If you remember back we thought we had a very small crop than we did, it was November-December even before we knew the full ramification of what we had and then much of the fruit in that overall crop profile was stuff the market had been telling us for quite some time, we’re not really interested in a lot of small sizes.

Grimm says that in looking at it the domestic production, it was almost the same as the year previous.

GRIMM: What changed drastically in 2008 was the export side and that is not necessarily where we would be moving most of our fruit but again 30-million boxes did go off so again the 2008 crop started with this relatively slow momentum because we were selling at very, very high prices.

He says that you really have to look at the numbers to make the camparisons.

GRIMM: We had about 10-million more boxes in the ’08 crop than the ’07 crop and the difference in farmgate value in those two crops was about $650-million dollars. Now it isn’t quite that cut and dried because again the profile of fruit in those two crops was different. We certainly had in the ’06 and ’07 crops fruit that was much more domestic market friendly than what we had in ’08.

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