Early Cherries Are Looking Good

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

B.J. Thurlby with N.W. Cherries reports on the progress of the state's cherry crop so far and says that that things were ahead of schedule this year.

THURLBY: We're definitely early. I've had several growers say that they've actually picked a week earlier than they thought they were going to pick. And you know it's one of those things where I think the kick off 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.

As far as crop estimates go though Thurlby says they're still pretty dead on.

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 you know as to what we thought was going to be coming off at this time.

The fruit coming off the trees appears to be of good quality.

THURLBY: I've had a chance to visit a lot of different packing sheds and just do some walk throughs and the fruit looks really good. You know by all standards what we're seeing in the market, fruit looks great, so we're getting ready to see this thing take off. Promotions are heavily set for the next 6 or 7, 8 weeks in a row, and so we expect to see this cherry thing start to really pull here in the next - I think by next week we're going to be hitting 400-thousand boxes a day. So it should be exciting.

Even with the recent rains in some cherry producing areas, Thurlby says it should end up being a very good crop this year. That's reflected in a recent estimate from the five state meeting for about twenty million boxes.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray on the Ag Information Network.