Gary Hunsberger
found himself unable to break even with his tart cherry production
about 12 years ago. The only way he could make a comeback in the cherry
industry was to make a big change in his operation, he said.
At the same time, Michigan State University (MSU) sweet cherry breeder
Dr. Amy Iezzoni imported the Balaton cherry from Hungary on one of
her travels to Europe. She brought it to Michigan and began testing
it with growers.
With nothing to lose, Gary decided to work with MSU and give Balaton
cherries a try. He now has about 5,400 trees.
“The tart cherries were getting cheap here 10 to 12 years ago
when I got into Balaton,” Hunsberger said. “There were
years we had a 4.5-cent cherry crop here that I didn’t break
even, and that’s when I started pushing out my old trees.”
Then he got into Balatons, planted the trees closer and had the attitude
that it would work out better than Montmorency.
Hunsberger said the change could only put him in a better financial
situation with his crop.
“If you’re not making any money where you’re at,
you can make a change and it won’t really bother you,”
he said. “And I talked to a few people, and they said the quality
of the fruit was superior to Montmorency.”
The Balaton is a premium cherry because of three main characteristics,
said Greg Lang, an MSU horticulture professor who is trying to develop
a high-value cherry market for Michigan.
“This is a red juice cherry,” he said. “So the red
juice lends it to new kinds of uses like wine making. It’s also
a firmer cherry, so it holds up well in the store, particularly in
clam shells. And while it’s a tart cherry, it’s also a
sweet tart cherry.”
Since the Balaton is classified as a premium cherry, Lang said they
wanted to focus on selling to stores that reflect that class.
“We’re going to stores that serve high-income markets
because we want to establish this cherry in its proper premium form,”
he said. “We don’t want to start out bringing this cherry
to Wal-Mart because people will think they can buy it for 99 cents
a pound.”
Retailers were initially a little tentative about selling Balatons
because the hassle tart cherries have been in previous years. But
after a year, they were asking for the Balatons again, Lang said.
High-end retailers didn’t want to touch tart cherries because
they had problems in the past with them leaking, being too soft and
messing up the displays, Lang said. But he convinced the retailers
to give Balatons a try and suggested they be priced the same as the
sweet cherries coming in from the Northwest.
“We had cherries priced at $4.99 to $6.99 a pound,” he
said. “We sold 80 percent of those packages and the retailers
came back and said, ‘We love the product.’”
Lang said there are now eight stores that carry Balatons.
“It greatly exceeded our ability to sort and wash and pack these
cherries at the university,” he said. “Now we have a grower
cooperative, packing line and transportation. We’re starting
to marry the infrastructure of the production side with the retailers.”
The grower co-op is called Sleeping Bear and is made up of 30 members
from Northwest Michigan. The Balaton cherries are packed and hydro-cooled
at a small plant in Suttons Bay, Mich., before they are sent to chain
stores in the Ann Arbor and Detroit areas. All the cherries are packed
under the Sleeping Bear logo.
Next year the entire process should become a commercial operation,
and MSU should be able to step back and only solve the small problems
that come up, Lang said.
The next step
To make sure growers continue providing premium Balatons to stores,
Lang is leading a study to determine whether hand-picked or machine-harvested
cherries are an economically smarter solution.
“We know that when you pick the whole tree and then you sort
the fruit out for top-quality, you’ll have a higher proportion
of fruit sorted that won’t be top quality if you mechanically
harvested,” Lang said. “So you have a lower overall yield
of top-quality fruit, but you’re doing it in a much-reduced
cost compared to hand picking.”
Even though not all fruit can be sold at a premium price, Lang said
growers can still use their entire production for different values.
It’s important for Michigan growers to diversify their production
portfolio, Lang said.
“Look at any successful business operation and you’ll
find a diverse product line,” he said. For Montmorency, there
is juice, pie filling and dried cherries. With Balatons there is greater
winery use and more fresh market opportunities.
“And when the grower can take his top-quality fruit and send
it to a fresh market, it could return $1 or maybe $2 a pound,”
Lang said. “Then the medium-quality fruit goes let’s say
to the winery and the fruit that’s still good quality, but bruised
perhaps, would get processed.”
The study is changing the way we think about producing cherries, Lang
said.
“Most of our cherries have been produced from processing, which
means the return is a relatively low price per pound and the grower
wants to put minimal inputs in,” he said. As a result, there’s
little pruning of the trees and minimal labor for harvest.
“Now we’re at the point where we say, ‘Wow, we’ve
got a market that will pay us 10 times the amount per pound that a
typical processed cherry would get.’”
And now growers can decide how much they want to prune the trees,
determine which harvesting approach to use and whether or not to use
a dwarfing rootstock.
“We need to get these Balatons advertised and get people to
start planting so we have a better market established,” Hunsberger
said. “But the problem is a lot of people won’t change
the wheel because it’s not broken. But that’s OK. It just
makes me a better farmer to sell a better product.”
