1/16/08 Cherry Meeting

Cherry Meeting. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Last week the NW Cherry Growers met to discuss the upcoming growing season. Bigger and better seemed to be a big topic according to BJ Thurlby, President of the NW Cherry Growers. THURLBY: But overall it appear like the talk is this crop appears like it's going to keep getting bigger every year and we have to figure out how to grow cherries to the highest level quality that we can on any given year and we've got to figure out how to run marketing programs that are going to drive enough demand equitable to the size of the crop. You might expect that the topic of labor came up once or twice as well. THURLBY: The other issue that is never going to go away when it comes to the cherry business is labor and we had some talks relative to labor that were I thought pretty timely and interesting from that angle. One of the topics that always gets a lot of attention is talking different strategies. THURLBY: So that includes everything from how do you strategize it within your orchard, how to achieve that and there's different strategies. There are tried and true approaches but there's other strategies out there relative to new approaches for planting, rootstock, varieties. And so that was obviously I think probably the topics that catch the growers attention and give them the motivation to come in from the cold and take part in Cherry Institutes. Thurlby says that only Mother Nature knows exactly how the 2008 growing season will shape up but the industry is getting ready for another banner year. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.