More On Apple Harvest

More On Apple Harvest. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Bruce Grimm, Executive Director of the Washington State Horticulture Association says that even though there was some hail damage to apple orchards they are expecting somewhere in the 108 to 109 million boxes of apples this season.

GRIMM: Which would be a large crop by our standards...given the shortage of crop in the East that certainly sets itself up to a very positive situation for growers here. We should see very, very solid returns start to finish this year. We’re also starting the marketing season out with a very empty pipeline. There weren’t large volumes of fruit coming in from the southern hemisphere and we did a good job of cleaning up the 2011 crop.

With all those factors Grimm does expect to see a very strong demand for our Washington apples and good prices as well.

GRIMM: The Mexican crop, the Canadian crop, the European crop; those are all down significantly this year from last year. So it bodes well for us domestically and I think in the export markets as well. I think where most people are thinking in terms of price in this crop would tend to keep retails at the $1.99 levels. That’s something we have no control over.

Retailer will set the consumer price at whatever they can to maintain a profit margin.

GRIMM: I think overall when you look at the drought in the midwest this year and the impact it’s had on the corn crop, those corn prices go across all of the grain prices and so I think we’ll see food prices very high this year partially as a result of that.

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