Pears Taking Shape

Washington State tree fruit is coming along nicely this year. Along with the cherry and apricot season it will soon be time for pears. Kevin Moffitt with Pear Bureau NW gives us an update.

MOFFITT: We just had our first estimates at the annual meeting in Portland about 2 weeks ago. People from the four districts got together during our board meetings and estimated the crop and it's coming up as just over 2% of a five year average crop and slightly down from last year.

He says the producers all agree that the crop is looking really good.

MOFFITT: No huge weather events that have hurt the quality and in fact this heat recently is probably going to maybe help the fruit size up a little bit so it sounds like a very good crop in terms of quality, good for sizing for the domestic market and plenty of fruit for export markets as well. At this point we're pretty optimistic about a good crop that is not too huge - not too small, just close to the five year average.

This still may be the fifth largest crop.

MOFFITT: But the crops have been trending upward over the past few years. They're now ususally 20 million plus is standard now and so they're big crops but they're not unmanageable and they've actually been pretty profitable the last few years as well. We've got a full line of programs lined up for the export market as well as domestically and we will probably have an early start this year, maybe five days early.

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