National Pear Month

National Pear Month

Bob Larson
Bob Larson
With today's Fruit Grower Report, I'm Bob Larson. We are most definitely in the midst of our holiday season, but this is an especially big month for pear growers.

2016 marks the 12th Anniversary of the USDA declaring December National Pear Month, which was kicked off over the weekend, December 3rd, for World Pear Day with an Around-The-World sampling of U.S. Pears ...

KATHY STEPHENSON ... "Starting in New Zealand, we'll kick off with a sampling event and go all the way around the world in a 24 hour period. We will have reached over 24 countries in order to show that USA pears is a global product and sold to so many countries, coming out of the great northwest."

Pear Bureau Northwest's Kathy Stephenson says the varieties of pears are endless ...

KATHY STEPHENSON ... "But in the northwest we have 10 that are more commercially available that you would find across the country. But these are the 10 that have commercial quantities that are shipping across the country. And these are green Anjou, red Anjou, Bartlett, Red Bartlett, Bosc, Comice, the wonderful Concorde, which is a little rare right now, and then our lovely small Forelle and Seckel, and I'm going to tell you, one of my favorites is the Star Crimson which is just brilliant red. We are on our last few thousand cases of Star Crimson so if you find those in your grocery store, you'd better grab them up now."

Nearly 16-hundred growers in Washington and Oregon produce 84 percent of the commercial pears grown in the U.S., and we export 40 percent of them around the world.

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