Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Just as cross-country shipping changed the face of the cherry business in the twentieth
century, international shipping may be doing it again today. The real gold rush in cherry
farming is in getting the first fruit of the season to the Asian market. Jet-freighted to Japan
and Hong Kong, fresh cherries fetch prices as much as ten times what they will bring at
home two weeks later. As a result, growers are striving for earlier and earlier harvests.
The typical Northwest Bing harvest begins in mid-June, but the real money is in getting
those cherries to market as early as mid-May. Generally speaking, this means growing in
warmer areas such as California's San Joaquin Valley, where the fruit ripen earlier.
This move south can be highly problematic, however. First of all, most of that area is
at the extreme edge of the cherry's climatic range. Most cherry trees need at least seven
hundred hours of chill every winter to go dormant. (That's the number of hours when the
temperature is at or below 45 degrees.) Without that winter nap, the trees don't have the
energy to produce great fruit. Higher elevations in the San Joaquin Valley can get that kind
of chill usually but not always. Furthermore, cherries are extremely susceptible to rain -
they crack and split - and winter in California can be very wet. Not only that, but cher-
ries that ripen in too-hot weather are prone to problems such as spurring (the development
of a little "beak" at the base of the fruit) and doubling (two cherries grown on one stem).
So, if everything goes just right, California growers reap a windfall, but how often does
everything go just right?
To a great extent, at least the last two problems have been solved by the introduction of
a new cherry variety called Brooks, a cross between the Rainier and a fairly nondescript
but early variety called Burlat. Released by the University of California in 1988, the
Brooks is no Bing, but it can still be a pretty good - though certainly not great - cherry.
More important to anxious farmers, it resists the warm-weather flaws of earlier varieties
and can be picked an average of ten days to two weeks before the Bing.
This has resulted in a massive shift in cherry growing. In the 1980s California ranked
third behind Washington and Oregon. Between 1992 and 2002 California's acreage more
than doubled, and in 2002 it climbed into first place (though production-wise it still lags
behind Washington). California now accounts for more than a third of the fresh cherries
grown in the United States (up from a quarter in 1992). At the same time, acreage in Wash-
ington has increased by more than half, but there growers are aiming at stretching the sea-
son longer into the summer, growing varieties such as Lapin, which now makes up about
10 percent of the national total. And in the big picture, total cherry acreage in the United
States has increased from 45,000 in 1992 to 74,000 in 2003, while sales of cherry trees
from commercial orchards almost doubled between 1999 and 2003. All of this leads some
