Thank goodness for dried cherries, both for their taste and their importance in sustaining the livelihoods of growers in Leelanau County and across the state.
Cherries easily outperform raisins and cranberries in the dried fruit taste department. We won’t qualify prunes, which are known for outcome over taste, with a comparison to cherries.
Although a relatively new product in the life history of tart cherries, which have been grown in Leelanau County since the late 1800s, some 35 to 40% of tarts are now processed into dried cherries. That’s remarkable.
Tart cherry juice including concentrate, whose market was based upon a foundation of university studies verifying the health benefits of consuming Montmorency cherries, occupies another 15-20% of the market.
Cherry pies have taken a back seat, it seems. But even the popularity of cherry products known by only one generation of consumers has not buoyed overall demand for tarts to a point of sending a lifeline to growers, who are reeling from another profitless season. It cost about 40 cents per pound to buy land, then grow and harvest cherries. Prices paid by the few processors remaining in Michigan for the 2023 crop were typically less than half that amount. One source we talked with put the average amount paid many growers at 11 cents per pound.
That’s a price point passed on the way to bankruptcy. Nicely put, tart cherries are at an inflection point. More to the point, tart cherries are in need of the next best thing, and nobody has come up with that yet.
Some have suggested that Leelanau County is in the process of an agricultural facelift, and will eventually exchange cherry orchards for grapes groves. Nothing against the wine industry — its success has buoyed Leelanau tourism to new heights — but wineries do not want nor require all the acreage now in cherry orchards to produce their products. Swapping cherries to grapes will leave behind the majority of county agricultural land.
Cherries aren’t alone in facing hard times. Although Leelanau grows fine apples — the best Honeycrisps in the world, we say unabashedly — prices dropped last fall and some were left in orchards with little processor interest. Corn prices fell off the cliff, although Leelanau’s sandy soils will never compete in the row crop business with the likes of black dirt in Iowa. Cattle farmers just learned that a TB-infected deer was diagnosed one county away.
Still, among all crops grown here it’s cherries that embody local agriculture.
Cherries deserve more attention. Leelanau produces more of them than any other county in America. Traverse City built a national festival with reliance on Leelanau orchards.
Cherries are an industry, and a lifestyle, worth saving.
