WENATCHEE — The 2023 cherry harvest brought in plenty of fruit. However, industry leaders are calling on policy makers 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 crops 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 that growers would also have to manage overtime pay for workers to put in more hours in a compressed harvest.
Unlike apples and pears, which can be stored in cold storage after harvest, cherries 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.
Box total fell short
Last year, Northwest Cherries, managed by the Washington State Fruit Commission, estimated a crop of 22 million to 23 million 20-pound boxes of cherries for Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Utah.
However, due to the compressed market, DeVaney said, the total number of boxes harvested was estimated at around 18 million.
Cherry harvests in the Northwest and in 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.
The glut of cherries caused prices to drop significantly, DeVaney said.
In 2023, the average price for a 20-pound box of cherries was around $38; in 2022, that same box cost about $69, he 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, he said.
“Labor is the most significant cost of production for tree fruit,” DeVaney said. “… Many growers had to make the real painful decisions (to not sell cherries), as they could not afford to pick their fruit.”
