Record Blueberry Crop

Record Blueberry Crop. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

It looks like it will be a very good year for blueberry lovers. The harvest is wrapping up on the east side of the Cascades and still going strong on the west side. Alan Schreiber, Executive Director of the Washington Blueberry Commission says it looks to be another record year.

SCHREIBER: We’re going to have a record year in terms of volume. We’ve had a lot of growth in our industry both east and west. Perhaps the most remarkable thing was we had some cool weather, we had some warm weather and then we had some cool weather earlier in the season and it resulted in a kind of concentrated set of fruit. So we had a lot of fruit come off all at the same time and so we had some really big picks of berries.

And one of the things that has been on the top of every farmers mind as they approached harvest was whether there would be enough labor.

SCHREIBER: But it turns out labor was just barely adequate and so we had enough to get a lot of the crop off. Our forecast is 80-million pounds. Two years ago it was 60-million and that was a record. Last year it was 70-million and that’s a record. There’s considerable debate about whether we’re going to hit that but I mean we’re going to have more than we had last year for sure.

Schreiber says that with this large of a crop a substantial portion will be going to the processed market but you should be able to find some wonderful fresh blueberries right now in your local grocer.

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