Looking Ahead to Apple Harvest

Looking Ahead to Apple Harvest. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

It is a bit early yet to be prognosticating how the 2013 apple crop will shape up but at the moment things are looking pretty good according to Todd Fryhover, President of the Washington State Apple Commission.

FRYHOVER: So far the weather looks to be good and it appears to be an excellent crop. We are going to be a little bit down on Red Delicious, Golden Delicious but the Granny Smith and the Galas seem to come back tremendously. The Fuji crop should also be down a little bit just because of alternate bearing on those three varieties but we look forward to another good season for Washington apples.

He does say we could start seeing some apples coming off the trees in just 3 to 4 weeks. At present they don’t foresee any issues with labor.

FRYHOVER: No, so far we haven’t had any real labor concerns. You know a lot of these growers are vertically integrated so they not only have cherries, they have apples so when the cherries so when the cherry deal slows down a little bit they can move them into doing summer thinning and pruning.

There have been some reports of damage due to hail recently.

FRYHOVER: We always seem to have a little bit of hail damage throughout the growing season. This season we had a pretty significant event that went a little bit north of us but seemed to hit mostly wheat fields and a few apple growing areas. There was a couple down south when we had that major storm here in Wenatchee. There was a pretty significant storm down in the Grandview area.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.