How climate change and market conditions are taking a toll on Oregon cherry growers

The Oregon Sweet Cherry Commission recently sent a letter to Gov. Tina Kotek asking her to issue a state disaster declaration for the cherry industry. The commission’s request for assistance follows a similar appeal made by a state lawmaker on behalf of growers in Hood River and Wasco Counties, as reported earlier by the Oregon Capital Chronicle. A wet, cold spring impacted cherry growers not only in Oregon but throughout the West, and led to a glut of cherries from California, Washington, Oregon and British Columbia reaching the market at the same time. According to the Oregon Sweet Cherry Commission, some farmers in Wasco and Hood River Counties decided to forego harvesting as much as 40% of their crop because of plummeting cherry prices. Ian Chandler is the Chair of the Oregon Sweet Cherry Commission and a cherry farmer in The Dalles. Mike Omeg is a cherry farmer and the director of operations at Orchard View in The Dalles. They share details about this year’s harvest and how a disaster declaration could help the industry cope with recent challenges.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Oregon Sweet Cherry Commission recently sent a letter to Governor Tina Kotek asking her to issue a state disaster declaration for their industry. That is after a glut of cherries from California, Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia all hit the market at the same time. Ian Chandler and Mike Omeg are cherry farmers in The Dalles. Chandler is also the chair of the Commission. They join us now to talk about this cherry season and the future of their industry. Ian Chandler and Mike Omeg, welcome.

Ian Chandler: Thank you.

Mike Omeg: Good afternoon.

Miller: Ian, I wanna start with what made this season such a challenge starting a few months back. What was this spring like for you as a cherry grower?

Chandler: We dealt with some pretty unusual weather in terms of having a late bloom this year. And then all of a sudden we had hot weather during that bloom and it caused everything to come on at once. But it wasn’t just in Oregon, it hit the whole west coast, which caused some pretty severe crop compression for us.

Miller: What does compression mean?

Chandler: Basically how the cherry deal normally works is you start in California, and you’re in the different climate zones. The same fruit could potentially be planted in California, and it will be earlier than it is in Oregon for example. Aas you get farther north, you could pick the same types of cherries all the way up north, but they would hit the market at a different time. That make sense?

Miller: It does. And Mike Omeg, am I right that in addition to, say, planting the same variety at different latitudes and having them be ripe at different times, that even within an orchard you might have different varieties which all of which could ripen on their own schedules over the course of a month or so?

Omeg: Yes. We as cherry growers don’t want to pick all of our cherries at the same time. It requires too many people to do that all at once. And so we plant different varieties, some that harvest early, some that harvest in the middle, and some that harvest late so we can spread that harvest season out over a period of weeks or sometimes months, depending on your location and your size.

What happened this year is pretty much all the fruit on the west coast was early and came available at the same time. And that posed a lot of challenges for us in the marketplace. The weather that we had in the spring caused that.

Miller: Am I right that once the sweet cherries are ready, it’s a kind of race? If you want to sell them, you have to get them off the tree?

Omeg: Yes. With some varieties we only have a window of a few days to get them picked to have them be at their ideal quality so that the people that are buying our cherries in the store have a good experience eating them.

Miller: Mike, how long have you been in the cherry business?

Omeg: My family has farmed our lands for five generations. We’ve had cherries for over 100 years. And I came to the farm in 2009.

Miller: Have you ever experienced yourself or heard of an entire west coast crop all coming online at the same time?

Omeg: No, not in my experience.

Miller: Ian, what went through your mind when you realized what was happening?

Chandler: Well first and foremost, one of our big concerns is to keep our workforce working. So we were looking for secondary markets for our cherries, whether that was with drying or freezing type deals where they get sent for processing. But the main goal was just to keep going, because just like the cherries need to go when they’re ready, if you can’t keep your workforce working, they will also leave. And then you’re stuck.

Miller: Let’s say that money weren’t an issue, and we haven’t talked about that yet, that’s a huge part of this. But if all the cherries up and down the west coast had to be picked at about the same time, were there enough workers to do that? Ian, did you have your full workforce available? Or were some of them, say, still in California?

Chandler: We were able to get a full workforce. We did have some individuals that came later than we would have liked because they were still down picking in California. And then once other farms had to stop picking, then we had kind of a grapes of wrath type situation where we had almost more workers than we had worked for.

Miller: Why did you have to stop picking?

Chandler: The money that we were receiving from the packing houses was less than the cost to harvest the fruit.

Miller: Wow. Let’s get to the money now before we even get to that part. How much does it cost to grow cherries, and to pick them, and to get them to market?

Omeg: There’s a lot of variables of course. But in general, it’s about 30 cents a pound for us to harvest our cherries. And it’s about 50 cents a pound or so for us to grow the cherries. And so just to grow the cherries and pick them, we’re looking at about 80 cents.

Miller: In an average year, and increasingly that word is less and less helpful, but in the past, how much might you get wholesale for your cherries?

Omeg: We figure we historically have brought in about a dollar.

Miller: And that leaves you 20 cents leftover, if it costs 80 cents a pound to grow and get them picked, you sell them for a $1.00, you can get 20 cents a pound.

Omeg: Yeah, that’s if you don’t have anything go wrong. The past few years has really hurt us.

Miller: And Ian, what was the price you were looking at this year when everyone’s cherries ripened at the same time?

Chandler: We were looking at, with a day to day decision with the packing houses, whether or not they could guarantee us at least getting 30 cents back so that we could continue to pick. And at that point you’re really just picking, you’re writing off that you’re gonna make any profit. You’re just really trying to support your workforce and keep them going.

Miller: I want to make sure I understand this. 30 cents. You’re getting paid so you can pay somebody to pick the cherry. But you’re already out the 50 cents that you cut per pound that you’ve already spent to grow them. Obviously there’s no profit. you’re still losing money, but you’re getting enough money that you can pay a workforce to do something.

Chandler: Right. And because our industry is so reliant on human labor as opposed to mechanization or other things, we have to maintain those long term relationships with the farm worker. And that means being a dependable place where they can come every year, or some cases our year round employees have their income come from the farm. One of our priorities is always to take care of the workforce. But we also are dealing with the same issues like many other industries in terms of inflation that’s hitting all of our different input costs, whether it’s tractors, labor wages. So it’s a tough deal. That margin keeps getting smaller and smaller. But the intent always is to take care of our workers first.

Miller: Ian, did it get to a point where the price was too low to even be able to pay your workers, so you just had to stop picking fully?

Chandler: Yes. On my wife and I’s small farm, we farmed 35 acres. We had to leave about a third of our fruit hanging on the tree because we could not afford to pick it and then still pay the workers. So we just had to walk away from that part of our crop.

Miller: With the sunk costs that you already had put in to grow the cherries and leaving fruit on the tree, how much are you in the hold just this year?

Chandler: I would say that for every dollar that my wife and I put into our operating costs this year, we’re gonna get about 50 cents back. So we’re probably $100,000+ in the hole on our 35 acres for our operating costs. And that doesn’t include any debt service that we owe on the property that we just purchased this year. So it’s gonna be a tough fall.

Miller: What are you asking for from the governor on behalf of the Sweet Cherry Commission?

Chandler: I would say we don’t have unrealistic expectations that Governor Kotek can wave a magic wand and make everything right with everybody. What we’re looking for is just to bring attention to the plight of not only the farm owners, but also that this trickles all the way down throughout all parts of our community in terms of how it’s gonna affect some of the vulnerable populations. Migrant and seasonal farm workers are generally immigrant workers who may be first generation here in the United States. They’re gonna have a rough time.

We’re also looking if there’s a disaster declaration to the federal level, that can help with some of the USDA farm insurance type of programs as well.

Miller: Mike, farmers obviously get into this business, or you’re born into this business as a fifth generation person, knowing that there are risks, that there are gonna be better years and worse years. And the hope is that there are gonna be more good years than bad years. How do you think about the question of what the public, what society owes you when the bad years come?

Omeg: It’s a really good question. When I think about my family business, I don’t believe that society owes us anything. What we’re asking for as an industry and as farmers is a disaster declaration [that] would allow us to gain access to resources that are already made available through the USDA to help farmers on the federal level, to help farmers that incur a disaster situation such as this. I don’t believe in private profits and public losses. I think that that is really something that I just as a citizen don’t think is good. But I do think that there is a societal good for the public to ensure continuity in farming and in other businesses, and to help out when things that are completely out of our control as farmers occur and could take family farms that have been in business for five generations and shut them down.

Miller: I should note that we reached out to the governor’s office about your disaster declaration request and we got this response: “The governor recognizes the serious impact of these losses on cherry farmers’ incomes. The governor’s office and the Oregon Department of Agriculture have been working with the cherry industry and local and federal partners on the ground to see what resources are available for cherry farmers facing losses this harvest season. The governor received the request for a disaster declaration and her team will be prioritizing this request, including reviewing any options at the federal level that may exist.”

Ian, how would the situation have been different if we were talking not about a glut, not about all the cherries coming online at the same time, but the opposite? Say, a freak ice storm taking out most of your crop. How would it be different?

Chandler: Well, there’s different types of insurance. One of the requests that we put into the Governor Kotek is just to try to use the same standards that Washington and California have for their crop insurance, which is how they calculate the production per acre. So if you have a complete wipe out, a crop adjuster would come and take a look at your crop and be like “there are in fact no cherries to pick.” And then there’s different federal insurance programs, they could look at the cherries and be like “you would normally get six tons per acre, you would get this much insurance money for the crop that wasn’t there.” But there’s not really provisions, at least in the state of Oregon, that deal with a revenue type of situation, which is what we have here, where you have lots of fruit, it’s just not worth any money.

Miller: Mike, that gets to something that I just can’t totally wrap my head around. Which is, I mean, this is a market issue to me, not a crop issue. Is there a scenario where this could have been less of a disaster? A different way that the market could be set up where collectively, you could have sold and we could have paid for and eaten more cherries? The cherries were there, and many of them weren’t picked because of the market. Can you imagine a better way to set the market up?

Omeg: Well, I think that I have a different point of view because I believe that this market situation was created by weather events in the spring in California, Oregon and Washington, and clear up into British Columbia. And cherries, as we mentioned, are a very perishable crop. They have to be picked. You can’t store them either in the orchard by waiting to harvest or store them in cold storage waiting to get them going. And so when you have a pricing that we receive as farmers is set by supply and demand, and the supply is really high, I see that as a monumental task to overcome. A retailer that is buying fruit in the marketplace that they want to stock on their store shelves when there’s just a tremendous amount of fruit available, they’re gonna look for the lowest price so that they can do what’s best for their business in the retail industry. And so I’m not sure how a different system could be established.

Miller: In other words, you can’t get the consumers to eat twice as many cherries over the course of a short period to squeeze all the cherry eating into a much shorter period of time. The market can’t absorb anything like that?

Omeg: Well as the cherry farmers, we’re price takers. We receive the price that we’re offered in the marketplace. We have very little control over what the price being sold in the retail market is for consumers.

Miller: I want to turn to the bigger issues here right now. Ian, it’s worth saying that my understanding is that after working in cherry orchards in high school in 1994, you then went to the military and then came back to the industry. Am I right that it was just last year that you and your wife bought your own operation?

Chandler: It was this spring.

Miller: Gosh. How do you feel about that decision with this as your first harvest?

Chandler: Well, I’ve learned quite a bit about that as we went through a pretty stressful harvest.

This is a beautiful industry to be part of. You have incredible people. You have to be outside to be working with trees, people, to see nature take its course. It’s a beautiful thing. Part of it is a lifestyle. Obviously, if you’re going to base your lifestyle on the income off of an orchard, you want it to make money as well, that’s an important thing. We have the attitude that it hopefully can’t get any worse than this so there’s nowhere to go but up. And we’re still optimistic that things over the long haul will work out.

The problem though is that if you look at the last three years, every single year we’ve had some sort of extreme weather event that’s made things tough. And then with the small margins that we’re able to make in this day and age, we are very fragile, I would say, as an industry, to these kind of catastrophic market conditions. There’s not a whole lot of reserve left over there to deal with these type of situations.

Miller: Mike, if you had the ability to just fully plant new cherry trees today that could actually be producing cherries next year, would you put in the same ones that you currently have in your orchard?

Omeg: I believe that overall, the cherries grown in Oregon are really good quality and that the varieties that we utilize are excellent. We are always looking at new varieties and new opportunities to plant. A cherry orchard that is planted this year is gonna be in production for the next 25 to 35 years. And so those decisions are not taken lightly as to what variety we plant.

But I think we are growing really good varieties of cherries now. And I think that the new varieties that are under evaluation and are being planted in young orchards today are also just as good. So I think that our variety selection is top notch.

Miller: The reason I’m asking is based on what Ian just said about three years in a row of various versions of extremes. And obviously, these are the kinds of extremes of climate change that are only expected to be more common. And we’re not just talking about heat, say some cold snap at the wrong time for the production of cherries. It seems hard to get it right in terms of planning ahead for decades when there’s so much uncertainty.

Omeg: That’s just part of the cherry business. That’s part of what we have to manage for. And I think one of the challenges that we’ve seen with changes in weather and extremes in cold, which in 2022 we actually had snow on top of our blossoms, six inches of snow fell on our orchards while they were in bloom and the bees should have been doing their work. And so it was like a day in December instead of a day in April. The previous year we had temperatures 118 degrees, the highest temperature ever recorded in The Dalles since 1893. And then this year we had the latest bloom of our cherries ever because we had a very cool spring. And as soon as the cherries bloomed, it got hot right away.

So one of the challenges our industry faces is that we’ve developed our systems and our orchards over weather norms that are not occurring lately. And that poses a tremendous challenge for us that makes it hard, and it jeopardizes the cherry industry in Oregon because of our profitability being low already with increasing input costs and labor costs, but our price essentially not changing since 2012, Oregon State University has used the same price in its economics literature for the cherry industry. So I think that we’re doing the best that we can in a very challenging situation.

Miller: Mike, was it about five years ago that you made the choice to join up with some of your neighboring farmers to combine forces in a sense? What went into that decision?

Omeg: I was really eager and loved being an independent farmer, having a family farm with my name on the door. But I took notice of changes that were occurring in the apple industry in Washington, with small farms no longer being able to remain viable. And I looked ahead, and said “I don’t see a path where I’m able to farm independently on my own and can do this for the next 20-30 years.”

So I looked at different options. One option was not selling out, because I absolutely would not do that. My family and I made that decision right off the bat. And so what we chose to do was do like six other families have done now since 2016, and that is join the Bailey family, the principal family at Orchard View, and be in this together to give ourselves economies of scale and vertical integration. And so we have about six families now that have joined into Orchard View. Four of those families have family members such as me that work here on the farm. And this year, Orchard View as a business is celebrating our 100 years in business. So that was a decision that I made because I saw many of my colleagues in Washington that were going down the route of selling their property or becoming part of a large investment group backed entity. And that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to be in it with family friends.

Miller: Ian, what goes through your mind when you hear Mike’s story, a story obviously you’re very familiar with? I’m just wondering what you think it will take to keep your farm.

Chandler: Like Mike had laid out, we have to make deliberate decisions that we’re gonna live with for the next 25 to 35 years. And we have to really evaluate what’s the best decision given the rising costs of what we’re gonna do.

Most importantly, to shift a little bit, we have to maintain our workforce and our community here. We have incredible professionals in this industry who have years of experience. We will make this work. I just want to put that out there that this is gonna work. We’re not the type industry that’s just gonna lower our arms and just go quietly into the night. We’re gonna make this work. We’re just gonna have to hope that there’s less of these extreme years than there are good years. And we’re gonna have to have more good years. You gotta eke out a living doing this, but it’s a profession that we love. We’re supported by a community here that is strong and resilient. We have good community partners that are helping out our farm, our agricultural community. We’ve got good health clinics. We’ve got good support here. So we’re gonna get through this. We’ll find a way.

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