Cherry Crop Outlook

Cherry Crop Outlook

I’m Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

Cherry harvest here in the state is expected to begin in early June. BJ Thurlby, president of Northwest Cherry Growers, says this years cherry crop probably won’t come close to matching last year’s record crop.

THURLBY: What we’re seeing is kind of an interesting change this year from last year where we had a record 23 million box crop and most of the districts had good crops on the trees. This year literally I think from the Yakima Valley, upper and lower, it sounds like the crops are medium at best. I’ve got some growers who are saying, “I won’t even be picking this year”, and that’s all the way to the Tri-Cities. We’ve got enough acreage in the ground in the state that we know we are still going to have a very marketable crop, but at the outset of this season we’re looking at this thing and we’re thinking “huh”. We were thinking maybe there was 20 million boxes when we were looking at this thing in February and with the pollination period we had we think it’s less than that.

But Thurlby says there is a bright side.

THURLBY: I guess the good news, if I’m a grower, is that we’ve also seen this hot weather in California really push their crop forward and it sounds like the California crop is gonna be coming off in their volume period between really the 22nd of May up to the end of May right through maybe the first of June and then really drop off. You know one of the things we worry about every year is how much of an overlap we’re going to see from California. This year we’re thinking because of the warm weather and the separation in the states’ harvest timing that we’re looking better than we had originally thought two months ago.

At a 5-state cherry growers meeting on May 15th the consensus with the industry field-men estimation team is that this year’s crop is in the 18.2 million box range, down 21%  in comparison to last year’s crop.

I’m Lacy Gray and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Ag Information Network.