Cherry season generates good profit for growers

QUINCY - Despite an inconvenient hot spell, the 2014 cherry crop should generate enough returns to allow growers to tum a profit.

The 2014 crop is either the largest or second largest in state history, Washington Fruit Commission President B.J. Thurlby said. About 23.5 million boxes of cherries were sold during the season, Thurlby said, which would make it the largest crop ever. But some of those may have been packed in Washington but grown in Oregon, he said. Final numbers will be released before the end of 2014.

Either way it's a big crop, and while it didn't rain it did get hot in some locations. Rain is bad for almost-ripe cherries, but severe prolonged heat is almost as bad, Thurlby said.

The triple-digit temperatures speeded fruit maturity, and compressed the time growers had to harvest the fruit. "Over 60 days we moved 20 million boxes," he said. "Normally that's a 90-day season."

The cherry season starts in the Tri-Cities and Yakima, moves north through Quincy and Wenatchee and finishes in Brewster and Omak. Triple-digit temperatures hit the entire region just after the traditional peak of harvest, and Okanogan County growers had to cope with a fire that grew into the largest wildland fire in state history.

"Growers really did a great of job of adjusting to the playing field they were on," Thurlby said.

It also helped that growers were picking and packing high-quality fruit, the product of good growing weather before the arrival of blast-furnace temperatures. "The fruit was just really good fruit,” he said.

The cherry market absorbed one of the biggest crops in state history, which hasn’t always been the case. Thurlby said growers and marketers have learned from those crashes.

The 2009 crop was one of those crashes, but the upside was that the low prices attracted new customers, especially for varieties like Rainier, Thurlby said. “We cut into a segment of the market that wasn’t trying (cherries),” he said. A lot of those customers stayed around, even after prices returned to traditional levels.

Growers have learned to market those larger crops as well, he said.

Cherries are attractive to those consumers who are looking for healthy snacks, he said, and marketers have done a good job getting the message out about the health benefits of cherries and other fruit.