2011 Cherry Crop Part 2

2011 Cherry Crop Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Once again this year the cherry crop is running behind but BJ Thurlby with Northwest Cherries believes there will be a substantial crop.

THURLBY: So far we think we have a crop, it just happens to be 2 weeks late and normally we would be well into harvest today and we’re not expecting to pick a cherry for about another week. So even in the Tri-Cities and warmer districts a lot of growers down there are talking about starting their Chelan harvest right around the 17th or 18th and we hope that turns out to be the case.

July 4th has always been the target date for cherries.

THURLBY: We’re going to have more cherries in July than we would normally have. We’re going to have 9 to 10 million boxes and July I think is going to be the peak period for promotional activity and targeting our, you know get out of the gates and keep the ball rolling type of promotions.

Even though it seems like a repeat of last year, Thurlby says there are some major differences.

THURLBY: Last year’s total crop was about 14-million boxes. The difference this year is that we’ve got some significant acreage coming into the bear in the later districts of later varieties which seem to produce a little bit more prolifically than our traditional Bing trees do. That’s the change. The other change is for the most part growers have at least a small crop this year. Last year I could look at 40 growers and there was 10 of them that didn’t have a crop at all. But overall it looks like we have a moderate crop on the trees.

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