Oct 6, 2009
Those Darn Tart Cherries

Again this year, tart cherry growers helped demonstrate that their crop is the red-haired stepchild of the fruit family.

Once again, there was the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth as some growers teamed up with naïve media folks to blame the government for all the tart cherries that went to waste, shaken and dumped or abandoned. The Wall Street Journal, always eager to fault government for social ills, implied that regulations left over from the 1930s Depression were the cause of all this ignorance and waste.

The government probably could have solved the problem. Maybe the Postal Service should have bought whole crop, bound it up in 1-pound packages and sent one to every American.

For the real problem is, the tart cherry industry has not been able to get Americans to buy even 1 pound of cherries per person per year. Tart cherry processors can sell only about 200 million pounds into a market of 300 million people.

Even with new products like dried cherries and fruit juices, and promotions focusing on health and superfruitiness, consumption has been level to declining for years.

When the USDA crop estimate came in at 284 million pounds last June, the “government” “decided” to “divert” 49 percent of the crop. But that’s not half of it. Tart cherries, like so many fruit crops this year, “picked long.” The final tart cherry crop came in at 355 million pounds, and the percentage “ordered” diverted went up to 68.

I first wrote about tart cherries in 1965, when the largest crop ever (before or since) took grower prices to 3 cents a pound. Growers then began talking about doing something to avert similar disasters in the future, and a few years later, passed their first federal market order ¬– by democratic vote of the growers, using those Great Depression-era “government regulations.”

The idea was to assure a decent price for growers. And some other ideas were built in to increase demand and boost consumption of tart cherries, in part by evening out supply – storing a part of big crops for sale in poor-crop years. Nobody ever did figure out how to even out annual production of this weather-sensitive fruit. And the price of new products is high. Tart cherry juice concentrate sells for $60 a gallon, six times what apple juice concentrate costs. Dried cherries go for $8 a pound ¬¬– pretty expensive compared to raisins.

Tart cherry growers never loved the federal order. It’s expensive to process and store cherries, and inventory probably depresses price in short-crop years. Growers let it expire once before and then, after another disastrous year in 1995 when overproduction sent prices plunging to a nickel, they voted it back in again.

This year, growers may get 20 cents a pound for the cherries they are able to sell. What’s better, 20 cents a pound for half the crop or a nickel a pound for the whole thing?

The world has wasted a lot of printer’s ink on this industry.

Federal marketing orders are tools that the government provides to agricultural industries. “The government” is a committee of growers and processors who attempt to make rational decisions for the disposition of the crop. Industry growers and processors vote for those on the committee.

Perhaps tart cherry growers should be left to fend for themselves, as individuals, and let bulldozers in the end solve the supply problem.

Back before the federal orders, growers blamed the processors for their ills. Now growers and processors are in the same boat. There’s nobody left to blame but the darn government.




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