This year’s cherry harvest is off to a slow start due to an unusually cool spring and summer weather. Orchardists report that high yields across the region are causing significant market impacts.

Cherry Harvest has been a difficult thing to forecast this year due to cold and wet weather which resulted in later harvest dates. But according to Northwest Cherry Growers we are now one-third of the way through cherry harvest. And at the rate things are going this might be the latest running crop on record.

Early summer rains and cool temperatures in the pacific northwest region have set cherry growers in Oregon and Washington back a few weeks. But nevertheless, the Northwest cherry season has arrived.

“It’s been a hard year for the growers. We had some labor shortages early on because California’s harvest went later than usual, then we had several rain events that were scary, thankfully those events didn’t do too much damage to the crop. And then we had this heat event that really did damage to the crop,” said Ashley Thompson, Assistant Professor of Horticulture at Oregon State University.