Cherry production in Michigan keeps national totals high

It’s cherry pie season, and Michigan is the largest grower of tart cherries in the country, the most popular variety for these pies.

Nationally, the production forecast for this year is 222,000,000 pounds. Lance Honing of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (USDA/NASS) says this is largely thanks to Michigan.

“Of that 222,000,000 pounds, they make up 182 million pounds of the total. In Michigan in particular, they’re expecting the biggest crop since 2018,” Honing said. In fact, Michigan grows about 75 percent of tart cherries and is up 37.7 percent from last year’s crop. “We had some frost issues that really limited the crop there. So even with that big increase, it’s still a very big crop historically and we’re in great shape for tart cherries this season.”

This year, Michigan not only leads the way in tart cherry production, but it also bears the brunt of keeping sweet cherry stocks high across the country while other sweet cherry-growing states are seeing stocks decline.

“The total national production of 355,000 tons is technically a 3/10th of a percent increase over last year’s production. However, if you take Michigan out of the calculation because it wasn’t included in the total production last year, we’re actually seeing a 5.9% year-over-year decrease for the remaining three states where we measured both seasons,” he explained. “That’s primarily because we’ve seen or are expecting a smaller crop in both California and Washington. They are by far the largest producers of sweet cherries here in the U.S.” Michigan hasn’t been included in sweet cherry production estimates in recent years due to low production numbers. Now that those numbers have increased, the USDA is once again including the state in those estimates.

Listen to Sabrina Halvorson’s program “This Land Of Ours” here.

Sabrina Halvorson
National Correspondent / AgNet Media, Inc.

Sabrina Halvorson is an award-winning journalist, radio host, and speaker specializing in agriculture. She primarily covers legislative issues and hosts the podcast The AgNet Weekly. Sabrina is from the agricultural Central Valley of California.

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