Cherries Are So Cool
Reynaldo Silva moves bins of Regina cherries at the Cascade Cherry Grower cooling plant in Dallesport on Thursday as Mitchell Huru of Cooper Family Orchard puts away his straps for his gooseneck trailer. Growers are saying the quality was good this year minus some cracking on Bings due to June rains. There are some 10,000 acres of cherries in Wasco County, according to USDA records.
By Tom Peterson
“Generally, the quality has been pretty good this year,” said Mitchell Huru with Cooper Family Orchards, a cherry grower on Dry Hollow Road in The Dalles. “This is our last day. The market is strong. It’s been a pretty good year.”
Orchardists have several weeks left of harvesting as picking has moved to higher elevations such as 8-Mile Road and Dufur as they pluck away at the some 10,000 acres of cherries planted in Wasco County.
Huru did note that some of the Bing cherries cracked after rains in June, which means their value dropped.
“Some guys are really up and some a bit lower,” said Megan Thompson, president of Cascade Cherry Growers, which runs a new fruit cooling plant in Dallesport near the airport. “It’s been about an average harvest across the board.”
The 7,800- square-foot facility water cools the cherries to 32 degrees Fahrenheit within 5 minutes.
Cascade employees have run thousands of bins through the new plant, each weighing around 380 pounds a piece.
The cherries are put through a hydrocooler at the plant and then stored in the refrigerated building before being shipped to Wapato, Wash., for packaging.
The building can hold 216 bins at any one time, and thousands have moved through it in a single day this season, said Thompson.
The packaging facility operated by Pacific Coast Cherry Packers is 87 miles away in Wapato, Wash. Cherries coming out of the fields in the Mid-Columbia are hot – say 60-degrees– and quickly deteriorate when removed from the tree. The new state-of-the-art cooling station puts the chill on cherries before the haul to Wapato, keeping them delicious, longer.
Working at the cooling plant, Reynaldo Silva said they have three refrigerated semi-trucks that move the produce to the packing plant. They are making a total of 12 trips on busy days.
Sydnee Byers keeps a close eye on chlorine levels and pH balance, taking samples every three hours to ensure the cherries are kept in primo condition.
Organization is key to the business as each bin is tagged with a color coded ticket, which denotes the variety of cherry and also contains an orchards number and name.
Huru was delivering Regina Cherries on Thursday, a late season German born variety that resists splitting after being rained on. It has a shiny, dark-red exterior, long stems, and a firm crunch. Payouts on crops are yet to come as cherries exported or sold to grocery stores are some 60 to 90 days out.
“Well be looking at what else to do with it going forward,” said Thompson of the cooling plant once cherry harvest has finished in three weeks. She said fruits such as pairs could take advantage of the same cooling process.
Regina Cherries from Cooper Family Orchard.
Sydnee Byers performs a test on water in the hydrocooler water to ensure the chlorine level is at least 20 parts per million. This test came at 24 parts per million. Pretty exact. She also checks the pH balance of the water to make sure the cherries are getting optimum preservation.
