10/16/06 Wrapping Up Soft Fruit

Wrapping up soft fruit. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. You can hear the smile in BJ Thurlby's voice when he talks about the 2006 soft fruit harvest. THURLBY: The soft fruit programs this year from our state growers and shippers are just winding down. Here we are in early October, mid-October almost and that's a fairly normal time of the year for us to get out of the business and obviously a lot of our shippers are heavily focused right now on apples and pears and so the peach and nectarine space at retailers is shrinking by the day and we're thinking that we'll probably be completely finished by next week, mid-next week sometime. Thurlby is the president of the Washington State Fruit Growers Commission. He says this years crop is a good one. THURLBY: Well we had good sugars. We saw that in our summer fruit and that was a very positive thing. We had a lot of good sized large fruit and the demand for them matched the great quality that we have. While Washington State is not the biggest soft fruit producer, it's an important one. THURLBY: We're not at the bottom of the list; we're kind of in the middle. We're approximately; on peaches anywhere in any given year 5th to 6th largest state for production. Nectarines probably 3rd to 4th. There's fewer areas that can grow nectarines successfully. Everybody it seemed like in the United States had a pretty decent sized crop this year. You know that's always a factor but the good news was that I really think our growers produced a product this year that was one that was competitive and actually a better product than most production areas could produce. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.