Overall Fruit Outlook

Overall Fruit Outlook. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Spring is underway and in the northwest that means the beginning of the tree fruit season. Bruce Grimm, Executive Director of the Washington State Hort Association says they are feeling pretty good about the wrap up of last year’s crop.

GRIMM: Marketing-wise we are keeping an eye on what’s happening with the pear and apple crops from last year. Number continue to look good in both of those realms. We are as you are probably aware, based on the April 1st estimate we are looking at about 108.7 million crop. That would be a record. Average returns are looking exceptionally good.

Grimm says we are in an unusual market season.

GRIMM: Eastern crops were down in volume. The European crops were down. The Chinese crop was not as large so you are seeing less impact. On the processing side we’re seeing relatively good processing numbers this year. We’re seeing strong markets. I think overall our crop was a very wide manifest. In other words we weren’t skewed toward an exceedingly high volume of premium fruit or the opposite. We weren’t skewed toward exceedingly large fruit or the opposite.

He says there just seems to be something for everybody.

GRIMM: We see near record export movement that’s very strong. The weak dollar is certainly helping us there but lack of competition from other areas would normally be our competitors, that’s having a positive impact, too. So domestic wise the east moved in a hurry and they were about 2 weeks ahead of us to start. All-in-all markets are strong, movements good and I think people will be feeling good about this year.

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