Oregon cherry growers hit by market, heat challenges: Kotek to consider state disaster

PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) – The Oregon commercial cherry industry took a hit this summer, when California’s harvest was pushed back by three weeks, creating a market glut as the seasons overlapped.

This week, Representative Jeff Helfrich of Hood River urged Governor Kotek to issue a State Disaster for the cherry industry.

“The market glut created by the late arrival of California cherry harvest season forced Oregon growers to harvest less than 75% of their crop; many of our smaller growers had to leave 50% or more of cherries unpicked,” Helfrich wrote in his letter to the Governor.

At Hood River Cherry Company, those impacts were visible this year.

Kristoff Fowlers’s family has been operating the farm since 1993 and he grew up helping on the assembly line, where they ready thousands of cherries for buyers around the country and the world.

This year, Fowler said they didn’t foresee any of the problems that ended up happening.

“We thought it was going to go great, we were looking at cherry prices going ‘woo hoo!’” Fowler said. “And then all of a sudden, just the sheer amount of fruit that California produced, it just flooded everything.”

Plenty of cherries were left on the trees this year, and those that were picked were sold at less than half the usual price.

“14 to 18 dollars a box, where it’s usually 60, 50 somewhere in there,” Fowler said. “I heard of farmers in Yakima and The Dalles that didn’t pick a single cherry. Thousands of acres did not get picked. It’s incredible.”

Governor Kotek’s office provided us with a written statement in response to Rep. Helfrich’s request, shown below:

“The Governor recognizes the serious impact of these losses on cherry farmers’ incomes. The Governor’s office and the Oregon Department of Agriculture have been working with the cherry industry and local and federal partners on the ground to see what resources are available for cherry farmers facing losses this harvest season. The Governor received the request for a disaster declaration and her team will be prioritizing this request, including reviewing any options at the federal level that may exist.”

But it’s not just this year, and it’s not just here in Oregon, that cherry growing has become a larger-than-life task.

“California, Oregon and Washington, we’ve never had as hot summers, we’ve never had water shortages. Labor, it’s really, really hard to find people. It’s just getting harder and harder every year to grow cherries,” Fowler said.

Fowler knows his family was lucky to sell as much as they did, but he fears the worst for others.

“Other cherry farmers, three bad years in a row, I think we’re going to see a lot of farms that are multi-generational go up for sale,” he said. “There’s just nothing else we can really do.”

He believes money from the state would help keep his farm and others afloat as circumstances change.

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