Cherries Begin Picking

Cherries Begin Picking. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

If you live around a cherry orchard you have probably noticed a lot of activity lately as some early varieties are about ready to come off the trees. BJ Thurlby, president of Northwest Cherry Growers says barring any other major weather issues this years crop still looks good.

THURLBY: You know we started out the five-state meeting looking at about an 18-million box crop, then we think it’s probably 6% or so down from there so you know the overall crop is probably in that 16 to 17 million boxes range.

There are reports that some growers may not have much of a crop.

THURLBY: There’s some growers that may go in and skim some fruit but there are plenty of orchards out there where it’s going to be a challenge for the grower to even look at it and say I can’t even possibly pick some of this fruit. So it’s going to be hit and miss here out of the blocks the first 2 weeks or so and maybe even 3 weeks in terms of volume.

What cherries you are seeing in stores are from California and those supplies will dwindle pretty quickly.

THURLBY: There’s going to be a bit of a gap here and then by the time we get between the 15th and 20th of June we’ll start having some Bing harvests and start to ramp up volume a little bit more but I’m afraid it’s going to be a little bit slower than we had hoped but still plenty of great cherries will be out from those trees.

Thurlby does say though that it looks like demand will exceed the supply though the 4th of July holiday.

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