Checking On Cherries

Checking On Cherries. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Now that the 4th of July holiday is passed I thought we should check in and see how the cherry crop is doing.

THURLBY: The good news is over this lighter crop, this crop that’s been depleted by Mother Nature seems to have pretty good legs on it still.

That’s NW Cherries BJ Thurlby who says they are hearing a lot of positive news.

THURLBY: Overall we’re hearing what we call repeat business coming back into the industry this week. We’re not even quite to the halfway point on this crop. We’ve shipped about 7-million boxes, just under 7-million and we’re thinking the remaining crop is probably has another 7-million boxes or so left to go.

Potential total for the 2013 crop approximately 14 to 14.5 million boxes. That’s a loss of about 4 million boxes on average.

THURLBY: Kind of a shame to see that we didn’t set the crop too heavy to start with and the weather really was optimal coming into the first couple weeks of May. I know all of us here were just thinking, wow, this is just going to be a great year because we’re going to have the size and the growers are doing their job pruning and making sure the cherries are firm and we were lined right up there and Mother Nature came in and kind of took out the middle of the crop.

Thurlby says though that the back half of the crop is looking really good and we’ll talk more about that tomorrow.

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