WENATCHEE — The 2023 cherry harvest brought in plenty of fruit. However, industry leaders are calling on policymakers to call the harvest season a disaster.
Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association, said 2023’s weather patterns continued into early spring and were quickly followed by warm temperatures, causing the harvest in Washington and the Northwest region to overlap with California’s cherry season.
In Washington and the Northwest, the cherry harvest is usually spread throughout 90 days, but with crop blooming at the same time, the season was compressed to around 30 days, DeVaney said.
“The schedule compression makes it harder to manage harvest crews, as you may not have as many people as you need to the same work in a shorter period of time,” DeVaney said.
He added growers would also have to manage overtime pay for workers to work more hours in a compressed harvest.
Unlike apples and pears, which can be stored in cold storage after harvest, cherries cannot and must go straight to market, DeVaney said.
“Even though we had excellent quality cherries in 2023, this compression caused marketing disruptions that led to some fruit not being harvested at all,” DeVaney said.
Last year, Northwest Cherries, managed by the Washington State Fruit Commission, estimated a cherry crop of 22 million to 23 million 20-pound boxes of cherries for Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Utah.
However, because of the compressed market, DeVaney said the total amount of cherry boxes harvested was estimated at around 18 million.
Cherry harvests in the Northwest region and California begin at different times, but the weather challenges throughout the West Coast delayed California’s harvest, and the cherry blossoms in all of the regions in California and the Northwest bloomed around the same time.
DeVaney said California experienced a cold and wet spring, which contributed to the overlap between California and the Northwest.
Because of the amount of cherries loading the market, there was a significant price drop in the product, DeVaney said.
In 2023, the average price for a 20-pound box of cherries was around $38, while in 2022, the average 20-pound box was around $69, DeVaney said.
“Keep in mind that we’ve see a lot of inflation over the past year or two, so to have significantly lower prices even as production costs are rapidly increasing was just disastrous for all cherry growers,” DeVaney said.
With expenses to pick and transport cherries potentially exceeding what could be earned from the market, many farmers in Washington opted to not pick some or any of their cherries, DeVaney said.
“Labor is the most significant cost of production for tree fruit and that includes cherries, and so you are seeing significantly lower prices as a result of the compression,” DeVaney said. “Many growers had to make the real painful decisions [to not sell cherries], as they could not afford to pick their fruit.”
DeVaney and other cherry industry leaders asked for help from the Washington State Department of Agriculture and Gov. Jay Inslee.
In November, Inslee sent a letter to Tom Vilsack, secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, asking him to consider a secretarial disaster designation for Washington state’s cherry production region, including the counties of Chelan, Okanogan, Kittitas, Yakima and Klickitat, and all counties to the east.
If declared a disaster, farmers could apply for low-interest emergency loans from the USDA.
Inslee also requested in the letter for USDA’s Farm Service Agency and Risk Management Agency to authorize policy flexibility for key disaster assistance programs and crop insurance.
Mike Faulk, a spokesperson from Inslee’s office, on Jan. 11 said the governor’s requests were still under review and no timeline was established by USDA, as information from the impacted counties is still being processed.