Record Cherry Crop

Stop the presses! The 2014 cherry crop that we reported last week was the second largest on record has just moved into first place. NW Cherries BJ Thurlby says there just seems to be more cherries out there.

THURLBY: Our northwest and Washington State cherry deal has been - I think - is probably go down as a fairly successful year and that's again, 23 million plus boxes it looks right now - and there will be a lot of reconciling that goes on this winter but right now it appears to me that we've got a record crop on our hands. Which is going to come out and be the largest crop we've packed and shipped.

The interesting thing is that even with this massive crop it has all happened in a record amount of time as well.

THURLBY: I've been calling it to the press a "whirlwind crop" where we started on June first and here we are the first week of August and it's just about done where in a normal year we get 90 days to kind of sell our crop and this year 22.5 million boxes went out in 60 days which is a record in terms of the amount of fruit that went out. But what I think we're going to come to the conclusion on this winter is that growers are going to be able to stay in business. They, hopefully, can say they've netted positive returns

Limited shipments are expected here in the next couple of weeks but there are still a few growers that are picking in the higher elevations. Thurlby says by that time we should pretty much be done and put some final number on this years crop.

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