It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out why farmers love their roadside stands, where sweet cherries fetch somewhere between $7 and $8 per quart.
Prices for sweets sold on the commodity market at their best might hit 50 cents a pound, but that’s not a price break seen in recent seasons. Forty cents, perhaps, or even 30 cents per pound, is typical.
Given that about 1 1/2 pounds of cherries nearly fill a quart, that comes to only 60 cents a pound when growers take their crops to processors. Sweets sold at stands fetch about 12 times as much.
In the simplest of assumptions, that makes processors the bad guys. But if processors are low-balling, why can’t they sell the product that languishes in their freezers?
It’s all part of cherry economics, which for growers in recent years doesn’t add up. A 2023 study put the cost of growing tart cherries at 40 to 43 cents per pound. Yet a group of orchardists going under the name of Cherry Growers Alliance is struggling to put a basement price of 20 cents per pound on their crops.
Unfortunately, the situation is indicative of what’s happening in agricultural communities across America. About two decades ago the country grew 50 to 60% of the world’s exported corn and soybeans. Now we’re under 30% for the world’s top two commodities, and the prices paid farmers are reflective. Corn is selling for about $4 a bushel today after peaking at nearly $8 in April 2022. Brazil, one of several countries including China that benefi ted from a US-led effort to increase food production in third-world countries called the Green Revolution, is the top exporter.
Granted, the $8 per bushel figure reflects world shipping problems during COVID, but it’s becoming obvious that American domination in agriculture is waning. Without major changes that favor farming, the worst may be ahead.
Cherry growers in Leelanau County have been hitting headwinds for decades mostly because the domestic market has grown only slightly while cherry imports have grown robustly. Given the saturated market in most years, growers are paid pathetic prices. Higher prices would solve most ills in the cherry industry.
There’s more to the story, too. Land prices have skyrocketed. Insect pests and diseases are on the rise, especially in 2024 due to more rain and humidity.
And growers are at their best producing a crop, not marketing it. The larger fruit growers who have vertically integrated their operations — a fancy name for processing and packaging retail products such as juice concentrate and chocolate-covered cherries — are better equipped to weather the storm.
That’s not a skill set that naturally follows knowing when and how to spray an orchard.
Traverse City markets itself as the cherry capital of the world, but it’s orchards in Leelanau that grow the fruit.
We expect a short-window harvest for local cherries, so let’s get them while we can.
And please consider dropping an extra dollar in the coffee can. Nothing beats the taste of fresh-picked Leelanau cherries except the feeling of helping a neighbor grow them.
