FINLEY POINT - It’s that time of year to drive along the east shore of Flathead Lake on Highway 35 as cherry harvest is in full swing.
Despite a beautiful looking crop, millions of pounds of cherries will be stuck on trees this summer due to supply and demand issues stemming from California and Washington.
“Most of the growers have good fruit, but the price isn’t there, so that makes it kind of hard to take,” said Flathead Lake Cherry Growers Cooperative Board Member Bruce Johnson.
Beautiful fruit with nowhere to go, that’s the problem cherry farmers along Flathead Lake are facing.
Flathead Lake Cherry Growers Cooperative on Finley Point manages 80 orchards, roughly 500 acres of cherries.
Johnson said one of the biggest cherry crops on record in California ran two weeks later than normal, overlapping with Washington’s crops, leading to a saturated market.
“The states that produce cherries in front of us have pretty much flooded the market and the buyers could determine the prices then and so when it got down to us, the prices are still low.”
Fluctuating prices were so low, that cherry farmers would lose money picking their own crops.
“Many of our pickers didn’t even come over for a lot of the orchards because they knew that we couldn’t withstand the price of paying the picking and then trying to ship it back over to Washington to process, and so we just had to either sell them ourselves through private market or sell them on the stand or U-Pick or just let them hang on the trees,” said Covington Orchards Owner Joe Covington.
Covington owns Covington Orchards, just over four acres of cherry trees in Yellow Bay. He said the return he will get back from selling privately on the highway is minuscule compared to what they bring into the Coop.
“Usually, we will send about 18 tons of cherries off to market and this year just over the cherry stand and U-picking we will maybe sell a ton of it, maybe a ton and a half, so there’s going to be a lot of cherries still sitting on the trees.”
Monson Fruit Field Representative Brian Campbell said this year's crop was shaping up to be an above-average year for the coop.
"The estimates at over 2, 2.5 million pounds which would have been one of the better years that we've had for a while and we're going to end up with about one-tenth of that."
With only a short window to pick before cherries become overripe, Campbell said it’s heartbreaking to see what’s being left behind.
“I told my wife coming back after looking at eight orchards, I felt like I went to eight funerals.”
In 63 years of cherry farming, Covington said his family has never left this much fruit on their trees.
“We’ve had to stop sometimes picking because of rain or because of hail, those types of things but never ever because of the market value being so low.”
