Lighter Year for Cherries

Lighter Year for Cherries. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

This year was a troubled one for the cherry industry. BJ Thurlby with NW Cherries talks about how producers dealt with the smaller crop.

THURLBY: One grower said - and this is a pretty big grower so it probably fits the curve of what everybody else is saying. Last year we had this huge 23-million box crop and everybody finally saw exactly what they see as a full crop of their trees for the most part but most growers are saying they had 40 to 50% less fruit that was harvested and then because of some of the weather challenges we had it goes into a packing facility and get put into its consumer packages and it goes down another 20% or 10% depending on the quality of the fruit.

Mother Nature threw pretty much everything at producers this year; rain, wind, hail and heat.

THURLBY: The challenge is the growers come out of this thing with probably half of the fruit that they had last year and a lot of times a lot less than that. Now are people happy? The dollar per pound returns are higher this year and that’s a positive. I think it will be individual by grower how well they came out relative to the previous year.

Other growing areas also had much better crops this year so that has had an impact on the market for NW producers as well. But Thurlby says people really like their NW cherries and they definitely could have sold a lot more this year.

THURLBY: You loose a little bit of your market share when you don’t have the fruit. It’s kind of a hit and miss. Yes, it’s good we didn’t have a huge crop because there’s lots of it out there but at the same time we could have used more for quite a bit of the season.

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