07/13/06 Pear Hail Damage

Pear hail damage. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Fieldmen have been taking stock of the hail damage and have been reporting some fairly major damage. Kevin Moffat with the Pear Bureau says that approximately 6 percent of this years crop could be affected. MOFFAT: It took a pretty healthy chunk of the pears out of the equation this year. It looks to me like especially hit was the Peshastin, Dryden and then up to Chelan and Manson areas and probably, potentially it took out about a million boxes equivalent of the pear crop so far. Moffat says they are going to be releasing some new estimates shortly. MOFFAT: Now we are in the process of getting and industry-wide estimate again. We just did our first estimate in June and we're going to do another one which we don't usually do it this early but obviously these are special circumstances so we need to get a feel for how the entire crop looks at this point with that kind of tonnage taken out. However saying that, the size of the crop would put it much closer to 2004-2005, which was about 16.7, 16.8 million boxes. So I think we'll probably come up similar to the crop that was 2 years ago. Again, this is very preliminary. We are going to do a much more thorough industry-wide estimate taking into account both Oregon and Washington herein the next couple of weeks. Moffat did say that some of the fruit that will be packed may a bit of marking and probably be sold to offshore markets. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.