Cherries Finishing Up

Cherries Finishing Up

Cherries Finishing Up. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The optimism of the 2013 cherry season has dwindled from potentials of 18-million boxes to now thinking it will wind up around 14-million.

THURLBY: If we shipped another 800-thousand boxes for the season that would be perfect and that’s kind of where we think this things going to come out.

BJ Thurlby with NW Cherries says only a few of the higher elevation orchards are left to pick. He talks about how the different varieties are coming out.

THURLBY: We were lighter, much lighter on Bing’s obviously because that was right at the peak of the rain events that we got earlier this year so our Bing crop appears to be in that 3 1/2 to 4 million box range. It looks to me like our next most prolific variety this year is going to be Sweetheart. The Sweetheart crop has faired pretty well because it was late enough and immature when the rains came that we’re seeing a larger Sweetheart crop than I think we have seen in the last couple of years so that’s a positive. Even the Rainier’s, Greg, the Rainier crop of 2013 was down about 40% last year we shipped 2.2 million boxes and this year we shipped about 1.4. Not quite 50% down. It was definitely much lighter than we had hoped.

On Monday we’ll check in on the stone fruit crop with BJ.

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

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