US (CA): Tough year for cherries

This spring's wild weather has added up to a tough year for Tulare County’s cherry farmers. "I'd say this was probably one of worst years for cherry growers in a decade," said Mark Keller, who grows 20 acres of cherries on his farm near Woodlake. "I'd say we lost almost 80 percent of our production here."

Growers said their problems began in the spring, when late frost killed off many of the cherry blooms that would have developed into fruit. "And as we got closer to the harvest, there was some hail" in late April that knocked some cherries off some trees or scarred the fruit, said Matt Vidak, who along with his brother grows cherries in Orosi and Armona. "It just depended on where you were when the hail hit," he said. "Some guys got hit harder than others."

Adding to growers' problems was rain in mid-April. That's a bad thing just a couple of weeks before harvest time because the extra moisture can cause the cherries to split on the trees. Vidak said he likely avoided more serious damage to his crops by hiring a helicopter to fly over his orchards in April to blow the rain water off the fruit.

Cherries are a relatively new crop to the South Valley. "Thirty years ago, a cherry orchard was unheard of in this area, and now half the state’s production is south of Fresno County," Keller said.

Before that, cherries were grown here just in backyards, since springtime temperatures here are too hot to grow popular Bing cherries, because the heat causes the fruit to "double" — two cherries growing as one mashed-together cherry — which doesn't make the fruit very marketable, said Rick Eastes, vice president of operations for Seald-Sweet International, Inc., a Dinuba fruit packer.

But that changed starting in the late 1970s and early '80s, when University of California, Davis, researchers began developing in Tulare, Fresno and Kings counties new varieties of cherries more tolerant of the spring heat here than the Bings grown in the northern end of the Valley.

Source: www.visaliatimesdelta.com