A late cherry harvest on the West Coast has some Flathead Valley growers worried about the local picking season, which got into full swing last week.
Farmers were told to stop sending cherries to the local processing plant for four days because of a saturated market but have since resumed picking. A number of cherry growers were also hit with a strong rainstorm in late July that left some of the produce useless.
A spokesperson for the Flathead Lake Cherry Growers encourages locals to come out and support the farms.
“There is a lot of fruit out there for the public to enjoy,” said cooperative secretary Ken Edgington.
Edgington’s own cherry fields near Yellow Bay fell victim to a heavy rainstorm in late July that left much of his crop useless for commercial picking because of cosmetic damage. Yet even if the cherry doesn’t look perfect, it can still be sold at local stands. Edgington said the storms were localized and didn’t hit all of the fields.
“You’ve got to remember that if you have lived in the Flathead Valley long enough then you know that we get little microbursts and you can get hit in one spot and a few miles down the road get nothing,” he said.
But the bigger problem for Montana cherry growers is the late harvest in Washington and Oregon, which is intruding on the traditional picking season in this area. Because the West Coast harvest is now coinciding with the Flathead’s, the market is flooded with fresh cherries and some are sitting with nowhere to go, according to Brian Peterson of Peterson Orchards. He said the backlog of fruit will mean his farm’s earnings will cover expenses, but that’s about it.
“Some years are better than others and this year hasn’t been ideal because we can’t pick every cherry off the tree,” he said. “In a week or two the market will rebound, but our cherries will be done.”
Sandy Kuntz at Kuntz Family Farm shared the same concerns and said some of the people who come to pick cherries on her farm had to go elsewhere.
“It’s hard on the wonderful people who come to the valley to help us,” she said. “They couldn’t just sit and wait for something to come up because they didn’t know if it would.”
Seventy percent of Kuntz’s harvest could go unpicked if the fruit becomes too ripe. In hopes of making up for some losses, she is shipping cherries to local grocery stores and promoting her roadside stand. People can also come to the farm and pick their own.
To try to avoid another season like this, many growers are starting to plant cherry varieties that ripen a few weeks later.
“This is one of those seasons. The cherry growers are doing the best they can, but we need to do a post-season assessment to figure out what to do better,” Kuntz said. “(But) people should come to the farms in the valley – ours or anyone else’s – and get some cherries.”