California’s late cherry harvest roils industry

Published 1:00 pm Tuesday, July 25, 2023

A glut of cherries means growers aren’t making much this year.

California’s delayed, prolonged and robust sweet cherry harvest has sent shock waves north, reportedly suppressing prices for Washington and Oregon growers and stirring up allegations by Canadian farmers of unfair trade practices.

California’s spring cherry harvest started late and overlapped more than usual with later-season harvests to the north. With so many perishable cherries ready at once, prices crashed, industry sources said.

North-central Washington orchardist April Clayton said she’s looking at, hopefully, getting 60 cents a pound, just enough to to break even. Last year, the farm’s cherries fetched $1.10 a pound.

“There is a glut,” Clayton said. “A lot of cherries came off all at once.”

Washington, California and Oregon — in that order — are the major sweet cherry producing states. The USDA forecasts that total U.S. production will be up 60% from last year.

A ‘cherry storm’

Sweet cherries for the fresh market must be sold within weeks of being picked and harvests usually progress from Northern California to B.C. This year, California’s harvest stretched well into the other cherry-picking seasons.

“It’s turned everything into a mess. It really has,” Yakima County fruit grower Jason Matson said. “This has not been a good year for growing cherries.”

Shelly Sylvester, owner of LA Karma Produce, a Los Angeles-based fruit distributor, said California cherries usually fill an early season niche. This year, the harvest started two and three weeks and was prolonged by cool weather, she said.

“That was the thing that really started the ball rolling,” she said. “I’ve never seen our market this messy. … There are cherries everywhere.”

Wasco County, Ore., orchardist Ken Polehn said he harvested cherries for 10 days in late June, but stopped because he was losing money. The harvest usually lasts five to six weeks, he said.

“We learned our lesson on that and we just quit,” he said. “A lot of packed cherries got hauled to the landfill.”

B.C. tree fruit grower Peter Simonsen said the California, Northwest and B.C. harvests were “mashed up.”

“It was kind of the perfect cherry storm,” he said. “Hopefully, it will straighten out, but there has been a lot of hurt.”

BC growers allege dumping

The BC Fruit Growers Association alleges U.S. cherries are being dumped into the province. “I haven’t seen it before and no one else can recall it happening before,” the association’s general manager, Glen Lucas, said Tuesday.

The glut is easing, but B.C. farmers don’t want it be repeated, he said. The growers association has asked the Canada Border Services Agency to investigate whether U.S. cherries are being sold in Canada at below the cost of production.

“We have decided to launch the complaint and see where it goes from here,” he said.

Efforts to obtain comment from the California Cherry Board and the Northwest Cherry Growers were unsuccessful.

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