NY apple crops looking at bigger volumes for 2018

 

“We’re picking heavy right now. We have a pretty sizeable crop in the orchards and the volume looks considerably better than last year,” says Jim Allen of Glenmont, NY-based New York Apple Sales Inc. “We’ve got one of the largest crops than we’ve had in the past five to six years.”

 

This year’s apple crop looks good thanks in part to favorable growing conditions. “We had an ideal winter and a better than ideal spring which included tremendous pollination, no frost, no freeze and very few weather issues during the growing season,” he says. “It also looks good because we have more trees coming into production because of all of the plantings in the past five to eight years.”

 

He adds that other growing regions including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Washington are also experiencing good crop sizes.

 

 

Allen does note that the sizing on some earlier varieties such as SweeTango, Honeycrisp and McIntosh aren’t quite what they anticipated due to the lack of rain. “But the midseason or later varieties, we’re pretty confident they’ll size up and be very good,” he says. These include varieties such as Empire and Fuji apples. He also notes that New York Apple’s four managed varieties—SweeTango, SnapDragon, RubyFrost and Koru—are also considerably up in volume.

 

And now that the warm weather is turning cool, demand also looks good. “We’re going all out to meet demand,” he says. “It’ll stay good September-October and once we get the crop in the barn, then we’ll have a better idea of what our inventory is.”

 

 

While not much changes from a demand perspective for apples in the fall, what can affect things is if there’s crop carry over from the previous year. “There’s a little bit of a carry over on Granny Smith but overall the inventories were very manageable so we’re not going into a fall season with last year’s apples,” says Allen.

 

As for pricing, he notes that with good demand and high supplies, pricing is currently whatever the market will bear.