Apples Dumped

Apples Dumped

Apples Dumped. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report.

An apple producer in North Central Washington State had to make a decision that hurt. That decision was to dump a large load of apples out of storage. The dumping appears to a lot of people to be a waste and in a lot of ways it is...but according to Jon Devaney with the Washington State Tree Fruit Association it really couldn't be helped.

DEVANEY:What we're seeing is still the fallout from the port slowdown that we had this last fall and winter. At the time we had said that our growers would be paying for that disruption to our export markets for months beyond the settlement of that labor dispute and this is what we are seeing now.

The apples in question simply got too old for not only the export market but really, any market.

DEVANEY: If you have fruit that comes out of, I can't speak for every instance, there are low processor prices and so processors have more access to marginal fruit right now that maybe insn't going to make it to the fresh market than they would in other years as a result of this slowdown issue, in a lot of cases this is fruit that condition issues coming out of storage that also make it unsuitable for really any food uses at this point.

The Red Delicious apples being dumped in a field near Pateros is really the most stark reminder that it was a record production year and with a lot of apples stuck in storage or in containers with no where to go, someone was going to lose.

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

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