08/17/06 Bringing in the Apple Crop

Bringing in the apple crop. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. It won't be long until the harvesting begins for the 05-06 apple crop. Early estimates were very good but extreme weather, hail and labor issue may take their toll. West Mathison is President of Stemilt. MATHISON: Well I think the 2005 crop that we are just finishing the marketing on is definitely exceeding expectation on the amount of demand and the pricing that we were expecting. You know I think there's two things really driving that. One is the overall quality of the fruit that's come out of storage and the advancements and execution of the Smart-Fresh MCP technology I think is helping our quality. In addition to that I think that there have been difficult growing seasons in the southern hemisphere and in terms of competing for quality the apples here out of Washington State were just as competitive if not had a better dessert quality to them. Mathison says like everyone else labor continues to be an issue. MATHISON: When it came to cherries we were able to capture enough labor to harvest our cherries however I think that we did come up a little bit short during the cherry harvest season to find workers then to do apple thinning and other jobs that were not cherry related because this last year we had pretty good cherry picking and so the demand was really for picking jobs and people would rather pick cherries and made more money doing that. Tomorrow, more with West Mathison. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.