Posts Tagged: cherries

California cherry crop 'unusually light'

California cherries are now beginning to show up at roadside stands, farmers markets and grocery stores, but the supply in 2013 may be a touch scanty, reported Reed Fujii in the Stockton Record.

Joe Grant, UC Cooperative Extension advisor in San Joaquin County, said the cherry crop is light throughout the area, across orchards and varieties.

"That rules out orchard-to-orchard factors, management factors or disease factors," he said.

Crop losses are often weather-related, but early frosts, or wet or cold weather during the bloom were not factors.

"Right now, the only candidate ... is we had quite warm weather for a couple of days during bloom," Grant said. That heat may have affected pollination and reduced the amount of fruit each tree carries.

On the bright side, the fruit looks to be of good quality.

 

 

Farmers turning in greater numbers to mechanical harvesting

The dwindling supply of workers has created a new urgency for California farmers to employ mechanical harvesting technology, reported the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

Some cherry growers, for example, were able to pick only once this year, said Chuck Ingels, UC Cooperative Extension advisor in Sacramento County. Ideally, they'd pick as fruit colors and ripens.

"They're finding that if they can't get labor to pick their crops, they're just not able to farm anymore," Ingels said. "So what they're going to is mechanization."

UC Davis agriculture experts, farmers and industry leaders gathered last month in Orland to watch a demonstration of the first mechanical harvest of Manzanilla table olives in California. The new technology could revive the industry, the article said.

Even pear harvesting, a grueling job that requires workers to climb aluminum ladders with heavy bags of fruit, may be ripe for new harvest technology. For apples and pears, there are platforms for workers to stand on that move through the orchard while the workers feed the fruit into flexible tubes, where suction carries the fruit to bins.

"It's definitely on the radar for growers in the industry," Ingels said.

It's a good year for California cherries

With winter winding down, fresh fruit season in California is right around the corner. The first fruit to come off trees in May and June are bing cherries.

The Stockton Record reports today that consumers can expect a bounty of the delicious and healthful fruit. California's cherry growers could produce a record-breaking 10 million 18-pound boxes of fruit this spring, according to the article by Reed Fujii. Last year California cherry growers produced 8.3 million boxes.

Excellent weather and an increasing number of acres planted to cherries is the reason for the projected growth, the story said.

In the past, the focus of the state's cherry industry was San Joaquin County, where orchards benefit from cool night air flowing in from the San Francisco Bay. However, new varieties are being planted farther south in the San Joaquin Valley, where they bloom and ripen sooner.

"In 1990, I'll bet there were absolutely no (cherry) acres south of Madera," the article quoted Joe Grant, UC Cooperative Extension farm advisor in San Joaquin County. "The lion's share of the expansion has been in these early varieties in the earlier areas."

But San Joaquin County still leads the state in cherry production, with 17,700 bearing acres in 2008 producing a crop worth an estimated $170 million, the story said.

Ripe California cherries.

Read more