Cherry Crop Estimate

Cherry Crop Estimate. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. If my one little cherry tree is any indicator, this could be a pretty good year for the little red fruit and according to NW Cherries BJ Thurlby even though it should be a smaller crop, it looks good. THURLBY: We met last week at the 5-state cherry meeting and we kind of go around and what we do is we have a field man estimate and then we kind of have a grower estimate and we also figure that the crop is somewhere in between. And our field men are thinking the crops going to be about 15-million boxes and the growers and our representatives from our 5 states feel it's going to be closer to 13 and half...13-9. That would leave an official first estimate of around 14-million boxes of cherries, again about a 30% reduction from last year. Thurlby says that this year's harvest at the moment looks pretty much on track. THURLBY: Our earliest harvest is looking like – you know 10 days ago we thought it was June 1st but just this cool weather we've had and as you know we've had a couple of decent weekends where it was in the 80's and fruit is moving along but I think our earliest picks are going to be around the 6th or 7th of June and then we'll get going a little heavier around the 10th and then by the time we get to the 15th – 16th we should be heating up. Last years crop was so large that many growers were forced to leave cherries on the trees when packing houses stopped taking smaller cherries. A smaller crop volume should help create good demand and to have fresh, ripe cherries for the 4th of July could make growers very happy. More tomorrow. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.