What Happened in 2012?

Friday Dec 14th, 2012 25 Views Fruit Grower Report

What Happened in 2012? I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

During the recent NW Hort Expo in Yakima there was a lot of talk about how the tree fruit season played out and BJ Thurlby, president of the Washington State Fruit Commission tried to drill it down for the group attending.

THURLBY: I’m really big on metrics. I’m really big on measuring. I’m really big on trying to understand the cherry deal from year to year and what happened. What went right? What went wrong? And then we spend a good part of the winter going back and try to determine how do we fix what went wrong. How do we improve that which went right?

He said that this was one of those years that there was a lot going on.

THURLBY: It’s one of those times where you go, ok, where do we start? And I think we can all agree if you are in the cherry business that we’re never going to have enough market for our product. The day we sit down and go, “wow, we’ve got enough market,” we should probably be moving out of the business because the day will never come when we have enough market. We want as much demand as we can get every year and as an industry, we’re working towards that.

And Thurlby runs through some of the numbers.

THURLBY: The shipped crop was 22.9 million boxes which of course is a record crop. We all know that there was even more fruit than that out there. The northwest shipped for 89 days in 2012 which actually was a pretty good spread. We shipped for 94 days in 2011, 84 days in 2010 and 74 days in 2009. The first shipment was on June 7th compared to June 13th in 2011.