Washington apples in crate

After speaking to growers in Washington State last week, estimates put the Washington apple crop short of last year's record crop.

In general, the crop is ‘guesstimated’ to come in at around 125m cartons, however, a range of opinions from growers put the crop between 120m and 135m cartons; it is still too early to really know, however.

Last year, the early estimate was for 140m cartons, but that was soon booted up to 155m as the avalanche of fruit continued to pour in from the orchards. With all the new high-yielding acreage coming into bearing, it's difficult to know just what the industry will end up with during a given season now.

This year, the growing conditions have been even more extreme than in 2014/15: hotter weather during the summer; a dry, mild winter that has the Gala harvest kicking off in late July instead of the ‘normal’ mid-August; and potential colouring issues on early varieties as fruit matures during warm summer nights (colour is a function of cool nights).

The worry over the summer heat is about internal fruit quality. The damage, if any, will not be known until the industry opens up controlled atmosphere (CA) rooms well into 2016. Any ‘suspect’ fruit will be segregated and shipped out over the next few months as growers don't want to take a chance on bad arrivals.

With respect to storage fruit, however, it's Russian roulette betting on the integrity of storage fruit on the heels of such a hot summer.

All of this is speculation, of course.

Last year, the industry was worried about the holding quality of its fruit but it turned out to be manageable simply due to the size of the crop - a lot product was dumped, but there was still more than enough fruit to supply all markets.

If the early estimates hold true, the 2015/16 season will be the third largest crop in industry history. Consequently, nobody is too concerned, so far, about a shortage of quality fruit due to this extremely hot summer.

Looking back, the 2014/15 season was one that can be summed up as: If something could go wrong, it did.

Problems included major labour issues at the Seattle/Tacoma ports effectively shutting down exports to Asia from December into March; the listeria scare from California apples, which had nothing to do with Northwest production but caused many South East Asian nations to stop importing US apples altogether for several weeks at the peak of the exporting season; and the Russian import embargo that not only cut off Washington from one of its significant Red Delicious markets but forced major European producers to redirect a substantial portion of their crop to the Middle East flooding those markets.

Nonetheless, Washington Apple exports are reportedly up significantly from the 2013/14 season as markets were in need of fruit and the holding quality of Washington product turned out to be better than anticipated. India, for example, has reportedly imported around 5.5m cartons as of 15 July (mainly reds), which is easily a record.

Retrospectively, the question is: how much more could the industry have shipped if it weren't for so many trade obstacles?

On a season where production records were obliterated, the Washington industry can only shake its collective head on what might have been…