NW Cherries - Final Numbers
From the Ag Information Network, I’m Bob Larson and this is today’s Fruit Grower Report. Cherry growers here in the Pacific Northwest wound up topping early season estimates for what turned out to be one of their more productive seasons.
Karley Lange, Northwest Cherry Growers’ Director of Domestic Promotions, says it was a very good year … at least production wise …
LANGE … “I mean, going into the season we were estimating at a 22.5 million box crop. And the season started out, I mean, everything looked perfect, the fruit quality, everything was lining up perfectly. And then, once the season started, quickly we started running into some pricing and supply issues like fruit backing up and that was a real struggle.”
But growers, Lange says are dealing with it the best they can …
LANGE … “And then, at the end of the day, we came out at 23.6 (million boxes) so a 4.6% increase over our estimate which is great.”
And the retail pricing, Lange says was another challenge …
LANGE … “The pricing struggle at retail and trying to get retailers to drop their price to where it needs to be in order to move the volume, the retail pricing just wasn’t at that point. And the growers are really struggling this year, and it was another hard year for them. I think this makes the fifth year of the growers really struggling and not coming out on top which is sad to see.”
Lange says it was the largest crop in six years so it’s nice to see we’re starting to work our way back up.
