Pears

The 2013 pear harvest is wrapping up and Kevin Moffitt with Pear Bureau Northwest says it is a bit different crop this year.

MOFFITT: We're pretty well finished with the harvest in Washington as well as Oregon and fruit looks very good. The entire crop is coming in larger than we estimated mostly due to the fact that we have a lot larger fruit. We don't have the final number on the size of the crop

You might think that large fruit size would be a good thing.

MOFFITT: In general it is but the problem is it limits what we have in the smaller sized fruit at the other end of the manifest and that will potentially limit some of the export programs. Also some of the retailers in the United States they sort of like the 80 sized pears, maybe 90 sized. And we actually have a lot of 70's and 60's sized pears and I've even seen some 50 sized pears out there so it's kind of a unique year.

But Moffitt says they have been working on the problem from a marketing standpoint.

MOFFITT: We have been very aggressive at letting the retailers know that we have a special year this year with jumbo sized fruit and we're setting up a lot of promotions and we're getting some pretty good response from retailers who have agreed to promote these larger sized fruit. I think we have a pretty good window of opportunity at least through the first of the year to get some of the U.S. retailers excited about it.

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