Dealing with Damage

Dealing with Damage. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

When you visit your local grocery store you see rows of beautiful, uniform fruit. Large red cherries and blemish free apples. High quality fruit takes a lot of work and considerable luck. With the unpredictability of the weather in the northwest not all tree fruit winds up being a desirable commodity. Dave Paul, director of USDA’s Risk Management for the northwest talks about what happens when tree fruit just doesn’t size up.

PAUL: What would happen is the insurance company would have to go out and do an appraisal and they would do a quality assessment basically of the cherries and most of those cherries end up being marketable in terms of our definition which is a specific size.

In Washington State that is what is know as a 12 row cherry. Anything less than that is undesirable by the packing houses and can be disastrous for producers.

PAUL: If they send their pickers home and decide not to harvest the only way they can collect (is) if the company came out and did an appraisal and said yeah, all your cherries smaller than size 12 cherries and then they would do a calculation based off of that.

Paul’s best advice for any producer...if there is a question...contact your insurance company.

PAUL: They’ve got so much invested in their orchard, year and years of labor, money, time. You buy and insurance policy and you have damage, just remember what you’ve got invested in that orchard and treat it as anything else you would insure. The first thing that happens when you get in a car accident you know you get in touch with the insurance company to make sure that’s all handled.

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