Another Cherry Update

Another Cherry Update

Cherry Update. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

You have probably been noticing some really nice cherries showing up at the local market and after a bit of an early scare, Northwest Cherries BJ Thurlby is smiling.

THURLBY: Certainly the barn door is not closed. We’re noth through this whole season yet. We’ve shipped just over 14-million boxes. You know before the weekend I think we’ll probably see it come right into 15-million and it will be the second largest crop we’ve ever shipped so volume wise it has been a good year.

Once again this spring was a long, cool, wet affair that had many growers revisiting the 2010 crop that suffered due to the similar conditions.

THURLBY: In the long run it probably turned out to be a good thing because our trees were reeling a little bit from cold weather this winter and I think the cool spring actually ended up being a positive other than the negative and I think that is going to go down as part of the nuances of what happened this year as something that was a positive.

The fruit I have been seeing is quite large, very juicy and quite sweet.

THURLBY: It’s one of those years that you look at the fruit growers has delivered and you say it’s been great from start to finish and hopefully will continue that way. Now there’s never been a cherry season without a couple of bumps and we’ve had some rain storms here in the last 7 or 8 days which has made some of the shipping and some of the deliveries more challenging than we would have seen but overall I think growers are seeing 10% of the crop that they thought they were going to harvest probably didn’t end up going into a box.

That rain also brought some damage to some areas and we’ll talk about that tomorrow.

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

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