Wrapping Up the 2010 Cherry Season

Wrapping Up the 2010 Cherry Season. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. BJ Thurlby, Executive Director of Northwest Cherries recently returned from a trip to Korea and Vietnam where he hopes they can broaden the export market for cherries. The growing season got off to a slow start due to a long, cool and damp spring but Thurlby says it has wrapped up nicely. THURLBY: Well the season finished stronger than we anticipated. The season actually went 89 days versus 72 days in 2009. We shipped 14.1 million boxes this year so the crop overall ended up being a lot bigger crop than I think a lot of us thought it would be as we started out the first part of July because we'd had that very cold May, a lot of rain in early June. But with all those problems behind them the cherry growers really saw a turn around. THURLBY: It got on track and it turned out to be what I would say was a real nice quality crop. You know growers I think are going to come out ahead this year as compared to '09 where nobody did and I think that's a good story because we needed it and you know maybe give people a chance to keep farming for another year and that's always a positive so overall cherry season probably wasn't as many cherries as we'd have all liked but at the same time it was almost the second largest crop we've ever harvested so that's what we're focusing on now is 2011. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.