Hop Harvest Underway

Hop Harvest Underway. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. It is hop season in the northwest. Hops are of course instrumental in the production of beer with some 60% of the northwest crop being exported. Ann George is the administrator for the Hop Growers of America. GEORGE: Keeping in mind that our U.S. acreage us reduced to about 21% from last year because of the poor market and the over-supply of hops in the marketplace have really encouraged people to take out any acreage that was not contracted as well as a lot of the contracted acreage was either rolled forward or bought back by the contractors so we went from just short of 40-thousand acres last year. George says that a couple thousand acres were not harvested last year due to a large harvest. GEORGE: As far as yield is concerned, earlier this season there was quite a bit of across the board feeling that yields were probably going to be down substantially this year, certainly not anything close to what we had last year which was just an absolutely stellar crop as far as yields were concerned but as we've gotten on closer to harvest I have heard a few rumors from people saying that they think yields are going to be closer to normal than what we originally thought. Like most other crops the early spring weather has played a major factor in hops. GEORGE: We're probably going to be yielding probably a good average crop, some varieties may be a bit under average and that's just because of the season we've had, the late cool wet spring that we had. That's the major impact on yields. As far as quality is concerned everything I've been hearing indicates that other than it being a pretty busy powdery mildew control year, certainly with the cool weather we've had mites haven't been nearly the issue as they would be particularly in a normal year in Washington. The hop industry has had a tough time over the last few years trying to keep up with a dramatic curve. GEORGE: The crop is very storable. With hops once you've extracted or pelletized it and put it into packaging and put it into cold storage it'll last a very, very long time. So when we do have an over supply like we did last year, that just packs the pipeline full of excess crop and we'll have to do like we did in the late 1990's early 2000's where we reduce our acreage down below what's necessary to satisfy annual demand – again in order to use up the annual surplus and then hope that we don't overshoot it the next time. Last year's Washington crop accounted for 74.5 % of the nations harvest with Oregon at 15% and Idaho at 10%. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.