Carlton Complex Fire Cleanup & Early Cherry Harvesting

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

A reminder that on Friday, Saturday and Sunday the Washington Farm Bureau Young Farmers and Ranchers will be hosting a Carlton Complex Fire cleanup and recovery effort to help those farmers and ranchers impacted by last summer's devastating wildfires. Volunteers will be doing a variety of jobs from fence building to trash and ash clean up. For more information contact Kristen Hinton at 360-770-3383.

NW Cherries BJ Thurlby gives us an overall picture of how Washington's cherry crop is stacking up this year.

THURLBY: You know this is a nice size crop but it's going to probably be down about 15% from last year's crop, which puts it at 19,700,000 boxes.

Thurlby says five months with record high temperatures over the last year with a warm, mild spring has prompted an early start to harvesting.

THURLBY: I'm sure that there's growers that have been around for years longer than certainly I have that might remember an earlier start, but in my 20 years I don't remember an earlier start. And I've got 17 years of data on bloom timing, and going back looking across all those years we've never started to bloom as early as we did this year.

And as far as recent rains.

THURLBY: Over the Memorial Day it never seems to fail that we get a little rain. The key again is these growers have all kinds of techniques to try to keep the rain from getting onto the cherries, but the most important thing is we don't want a 90 some degree day following a big rain storm.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray with the Ag Information Network of the West.