Moving Cherries

Moving Cherries. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The cherry harvest is moving along nicely according to BJ Thurlby with NW Cherries.

THURLBY: Well we’re about 6 1/2 pushing 7 million boxes in the harvest. Shipment and movement has been pretty good this week. And you always worry because the 4th of July holiday is kind of a slow down period. We’ve got a lot of great promotions that are set and in place for the next 4 weeks and by the feel of this crop we’re going to need them all.

He says they have really hit their stride in getting the cherries off the trees and they hoped to see a lot of cherries moved this last weekend as the 4th holiday ended. Growers finally got a break from Mother Nature.

THURLBY: The growers right now are sitting there looking at the heat up north and of course we’re hoping we can avoid a real compression of the late northern crop with the mid-season crop. You know harvest is going on in the mid-valley right now and the cherries are being harvested all over here in the Yakima area. The Tri-Cities is for the most part done. There’s some later varieties down there planted that will still be harvested.

The 4th of July holiday has typically been the benchmark date to have a good crop in the stores and growers hit that this year even with the cool rainy weather that plagued many areas.

THURLBY: The quality that we’ve seen this week has just been off the charts. it’s just really good to see some larger sized cherries coming in and going out and you know I just can’t wait to get them all out to the shelves so the consumers can enjoy them. So that’s where we are.

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