Providing Fruit

Providing Fruit. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Washington State is in a very enviable position when it comes to being able to supply fresh tree to the rest of the U.S. and the world. At a recent conference, WSU’s Sustainable Ag Specialist, David Granatstein went over some of the numbers for fruit production,

GRANATSTEIN: Washington comes in at about 67% of the organic apple acres but 93% of the fresh apple productions so in that case it’s pretty clear we totally dominate the U.S. marketplace in that. For pears, we’re about 80% of the production and 94 so we couldn’t be in a more enviable position in terms of the bulk of the supply coming from this state.

He says there have not been a lot of changes in the state.

GRANATSTEIN: We did drop after 2009 but now it;s been increasing and probably the biggest change is in 2015 we see quite a bit higher number of transition acres. I did a survey last winter which I’ll mention and so this growth is pretty much in line with that expectation that we’re going to see increases in organic apples in particular.

He says that organic apples have just become a very dominant crop in the state.

GRANATSTEIN: Organic apple acreage, we had the big jump in ’89 Alar happened and then things kind of dropped off after that. Some of you remember that. Then we had a run up here in the 90’s when the Red Delicious collapse was happening so we saw a lot of transition acres at that time. Then the second one happened in the mid-2000’s. The retail chains started ordering a lot of organic apples and so now I think we’re about to go another step.

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