Shorter Cherry Crop

Shorter Cherry Crop

Shorter Cherry Crop. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The 2013 cherry crop is just beginning to come off the trees and BJ Thurlby with NW Cherries is optimistic about it even though the start has been a wild one.

THURLBY: Well it started out we had a really nice, warm May going and somewhere in the week of the 16th of May we saw more rain than we certainly wanted to see in this industry and it kind of carried on for about a week and for a good part of that week the cherries were just not far enough along to have too much negative impact.

But as the rains kept falling off and on last week some varieties started seeing problems and Thurlby says it appears it’s mostly towards the early part of the crop.

THURLBY: We spent this weekend diligently trying to track down information from our field estimation team and they did basically a great job of getting back to us. So we think that the front end of the crop is down anywhere from 10 to 30% from where it was. Certainly we’ve seen some significant reduction but when you look at that picture as a whole - looking at the whole season the entire crop is down probably 5 or 6%.

So guesstimates for the overall crop?

THURLBY: You know the overall crop is probably in the 16 to 17 million box range. And now we’ll all knock on wood and cross our fingers that this is the last serious rain event that we’re going to see for the season

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

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