2014 Cherry Crop Update

Northwest cherry producers have been picking cherries now for about a week and half and we get an update from NW Cherries, BJ Thurlby.

THURLBY: As we sit right now we're at 1.3 million boxes shipped in the first 11 days of shipping and that's pretty close to our estimate as to what we thought was going to be coming off at this time. We're definitely early. I've had several growers actually say that they picked a week earlier than they thought they were going to pick. The kickoff here is coming quicker than we as an industry anticipated but we knew this thing was going to be early and it is. And it's only going to get more intense from here on out because there's a lot of great fruit on the way.

The recent estimate from the 5-State meeting was for about 20-million boxes.

THURLBY: Last week I had a chance to visit a lot of different packing sheds and just do some walk-throughs and the fruit looks really good. Promotions are heavily set for the next 6 or 7, 8 weeks in a row and so we expect to see this cherry things start to really pull here in the next - I think by next week we're going to be hitting 400-thousand boxes day.

We are slowly starting to see northwest cherries replacing the higher priced California fruit in the grocery stores. With California's drought and lack of much product we were seeing some cherries as high as $7.99 a pound and frankly the fruit wasn't all that good. Thurlby says that even with some weather issues in some growing areas this should be a good crop. And we'll have more with BJ on Monday.

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