More Cherries Coming

The 2014 NW cherry crop is gaining speed. Early fruit in stores was from California and due to their problems this year was very high priced. BJ Thurlby with NW Cherries says this is an important topic.

THURLBY: How do we maneuver a retailer into retail pricing especially when here we are picking this beautiful crop, it's time to go and we're hearing from numerous retailers that they'er just trying to get rid of the last of those 7.99 California Bings and if you've seen them in the stores you've seen that they're different shades of red and compared to what we're seeing on our trees right now they just don't stand up.

He says they have a message for retailers.

THURLBY: Get these things priced to sell, get our stuff into these stores, build those disc plays big and let's have a home run of a cherry year.

And so far this year weather has not played a very big role in the cherry crop which is a good thing.

THURLBY: The weather has been optimal. We might have had a little something here or something there but we still have a full crop. That's all there is to it. The sizing, I was just running those numbers. We're at 65% 10.5 row and larger which is a quarter size cherry, that's a one-inch cherry. That's where we want to be as an industry and we're winding our Chelan harvest down quickly and we're moving into Bings. I know in Tri-Cities we're got growers picking Bing's already. So it's exciting but overall sizing looks good, cherries are spread throughout the trees and one of the things I've noted is the uniform color that we're seeing and that's really a positive.

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