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By SUE RYAN
News staff writer
July 26,
2006
(Second of two parts)
The impact of product not moving early in the 2006 cherry
harvest has slowed reorders and lowered prices.
While cherries being picked now during the 2006 harvest in Hood
River County have improved, the softness of some early fruit in
the market has impacted prices overall.
“It has been a real strange year with a lot of soft cherries, a
lot of small cherries out of the Northwest,” said John Bailey, a
sales agent for Grant J. Hunt Company in The Dalles.
He referred to the condition of cherries in general across the
Northwest. Bailey sells cherries for Orchard View in The Dalles
and Spring Creek in Hood River and said some varieties locally
were hit harder than others by mid-July heat, including Lamberts
in Hood River and Lapins in The Dalles.
“It’s going to be a tough year for some cherry growers,” he
said.
The cherry harvest starts in The Dalles then travels westward to
Mosier and Hood River and finally Parkdale. When fruit goes to
market, growers get the most money for fruit sold fresh. For
this year’s harvest, the choices became more complicated by
market forces.
“If cherries are not big and firm and taste good, then the
consumer doesn’t pick them up as readily,” said Neil Galone,
vice-president of marketing for Diamond Fruit Inc. in Odell.
Galone said inventory left over following the July Fourth
holiday meant retailers got pickier about what they accepted.
When retailers buy a box of fruit, they don’t always recoup the
full value of the box. The margin is known as retail shrink,
which increases if the product doesn’t sell. Retailers often
order less because the consumer is buying less and that leaves
more cherries on the market. In the meantime, growers and
shippers continue the harvest.
“When cherries are ready, they are ready and need to be
harvested,” Galone said. “So we kept picking, packing and
shipping into that market.”
Adding more cherries to an already slow market means surplus and
a lower price. While growers have other choices than going to
the fresh market to sell, Galone says there are two options
which bring a lower price. One option is to sell on the
wholesale market; the other is to send cherries to be processed
as jam or canned.
“Going fresh is almost always better; you get more money and get
it faster,” Galone said.
But growers have to add in one more factor: In a pickier retail
market, a load of cherries runs the risk of being rejected.
“Rejected loads end up getting half of what it’s worth,” he
said. “Then you have the task of selling a rejected load on the
wholesale market, which goes lower when there are 10, 20, 30 of
those loads dumped on it.”
While the early softness issues are past as field workers report
hard, firm cherries coming off the trees, the impact on the
market remains from a month ago.
Both Galone and Bailey said it’s uncertain what effect recent
hot temperatures will have on the remaining harvest going to
market. While harvest volume may have increased overall from
last year, prices are lower than 2005.
“I’m trying to emphasize this is the best crop ever,” Galone
said. “But I would say prices are 30 percent or more below last
year’s market.” |
