By John Schmitz
Western Correspondent
Is the world
ready for stemless sweet cherries? Despite a somewhat slow go out
of the starting gate, a vertically integrated packing house in south
central Washington thinks so.
“We’d like to think it’ll grow but it’s been
a slow process, and hopefully one day we’ll have a substantial
portion of our cherries stemless,” said Lowell Lancaster, part
owner and manager of Western Sweet Cherry Company (WSCC) in Yakima.
Lancaster's partners in the packing house are fellow cherry growers
Bob Hayden and Denny Harris.
Central to WSCC’s goal of eventually converting all of its production
over to stemless cherries is a new mechanical cherry harvester being
developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural
Research Service in West Virginia. The picker saw limited action in
both Hayden’s and Harris’s orchards the last two years.
Designed to work in specially trained trees grown in a Y configuration,
the picker has shown that it can harvest cherries with little or no
damage. Before harvest the cherries are treated with the growth regulator
Ethrel so that they detach easily from the tree when it’s gently
shaken.
Because the picker was assigned to harvest cherries at Washington
State University’s Prosser research station, it was not available
to Hayden and Harris this year.
“At this point we’re picking all of our stem-free cherries
by hand,” Lancaster said.
Last year WSCC sold 400 tons of stemless sweet cherries and looks
to exceed that this year. The cherries are packed in clamshells and
sold under the Black Tie label.
WSCC sells most of its stemless production to Grower Direct in Stockton,
Calif., and deals directly with a few supermarket chains.
Lancaster said that WSCC will be in the market to buy a mechanical
picker if, and when, it becomes commercially available.
“If we can get it to do the job it needs to do, you bet, providing
we have the markets established for it,” he said.
Optimism over the picker is evident in all new plantings, which are
being grown in the special configuration compatible with the harvester.
So what’s behind Western’s desire to establish stemless
cherries in the marketplace? Two words: labor costs.
With Washington’s minimum wage now the highest in the land at
$7.16 an hour, and pegged to the cost of living index in the spendy
Puget Sound area, Lancaster and his partners have to compete with
lower-priced cherries picked for much less in other states.
Matt Whiting, WSU assistant professor of horticulture, who has been
working extensively with the picker, said that it can harvest cherries
at a cost of 2 to 4 cents per pound, compared to at least 16 cents
per pound for hand picking.
“As the labor supply gets tighter the price goes up,”
he said.
When WSCC built its packing line it did so with stemless cherries
in mind.
“Some of the angles cherries travel up and down are a little
less that conventional lines because cherries without the stem roll
like ball bearings,” Lancaster said.
The key to marketing the stemless cherries is finding buyers who are
willing to take a new venture, Lancaster said.
“You’ve got to get to the right person who will say let’s
take a look at it,” he said. “Some buyers say we’ve
been having good luck with what we’re doing and we’re
not going to change, we don’t have time to do it or we don’t
have the shelf space. They have a jillion reasons. But once people
try them they usually like them and usually reorder.”
Though it hasn’t been scientifically proven, Lancaster and his
partners feel that stemless cherries have better legs than stem-on
cherries because they better retain moisture.
“We think it will extend shelf life,” Lancaster said.
“After the cherry comes off the tree and the stem is still attached
to the cherry, the stem is a living, breathing thing and trying to
stay alive, so we think it pulls moisture out of the cherry.”
Another advantage of the stemless cherry, Lancaster said, is that
there is no stem to become discolored.
“You don’t have customers looking at them and saying these
are old and tired because the stems are brown,” he said.
Because the cherries are treated with a stem loosener, hand pickers
have to be educated on how to harvest them, Lancaster said.
“The technique’s a little different,” he said. “Instead
of grabbing them by the stem we have to teach them how to roll or
massage them off the stem. We call it tickling them off.”
So far Bings and Lapins have been the varieties of choice for stemless
production.
“Bob and Denny have some Chelans in the ground so they’re
trying to capture the early market,” Lancaster said. “In
the upper valley where I live, in the higher elevations, I’m
planting Lapins and Sweethearts and later-maturing varieties.”
This year from 15 to 20 percent of WSCC’s production will be
made up of stemless cherries, up from 10 to 12 percent last year.
Lancaster said that to his knowledge no one else is offering stemless
sweet cherries.
“There’s not been much interest in the industry for stem
free cherries from a production point of view,” he said.
WSCC began receiving cherries June 3 and planned to wrap up harvest
July 15.
The sweet cherry harvest in several Northwest growing areas was dampened
this year due to rains in late May and early June.
“It’s been a little struggle because of the problems with
weather related issues down in Pasco and Columbia River area,”
Lancaster said. “We had 18 hours of steady rain down there,
and that didn’t help anybody.”
WSCC ships its cherries “pretty much the same day they come
in,” Lancaster said. If kept at an optimum temperature (32°
to 34° F), stemless cherries remain marketable for two to three
weeks, he said.
The cherries, which end up all over the country, retail for about
the same price as stem-on cherries.
“We’re not getting a premium,” Lancaster said.
