A banner crop has flooded the marketplace with cherries, bringing lower prices for farmers, and consumers.
A bounteous harvest of Bings and Rainiers has overloaded market shelves with cheap cherries. Consumers are gobbling them up for $1.25 a pound, but growers are struggling to make expenses.
Some growers who got their cherries to market early, in late June or early July, did well financially. But those who shipped in the middle of the season got stung. At best, many will make 40 cents a pound on their cherries, far below the 75 cents a pound they need to cover their costs, says Brad Fowler, a Hood River grower and processor.
Many farmers are letting cherries rot on the trees because they would lose even more money paying people to pick and pack them. The taxpayer-subsidized federal crop insurance program is expecting a large number of claims from cherry growers hoping to recover some of their losses.
Read Harris Meyer’s full report for the Oregonian.
