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By Brooke Jarvis
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Consider the cherry. Consider this cherry, in fact, this one here, which hangs from the tree at the end of a long row of intense green.Watch your red, golden skin shine in the bright sun.It’s a remarkable hybrid strain, a Rainier, which means it has a soft yellow pulp and you’ll have to pay a lot to eat it.If you do, it’ll be delicious, with the taste of summer.But first you’ll have to do it for yourself.
So far, this cherry has been the luckiest: no disease has come for your tree, there is a bad, small cherry disease, which is widespread in the nearby orchards.No frost prevented its spring flowers from giving way to fruit.No rain has fallen above in a short time since it matured.
This may have been a disaster, as water likes to accumulate in the small ditch near the stem, there it filters into the pulp and causes the cherry to swell too much, and the cherry will burst through its own skin.cracks; The total harvest can be lost in this way.Poorly synchronized water is so harmful that cherry growers rely on fans, wind turbines and even helicopters flying at low altitudes to dry ripe fruit before it gets lost.However, the wind presents its own danger: they can hit the opposite cherries or on the branches, bruising them to the point of rejecting them on the packaging line, where culmination is taken care of according to their length and quality with high-tech optical scanners.their color, they are able to show their beyond with revealing “wind marks”, small incursions of browning into this golden skin.This cherry has only a few.
But it’s not on the market yet. The window in which a sweet cherry can be collected for sale is terribly narrow, the cherries do not continue to ripen once they are removed from the tree, as a peach does, and once collected, do not remain for long, even when refrigerated.If they are too mature, they will not succeed at the packing station, the truck or the plane, the grocery store, their summer dessert.The sugar content is Goldilocksian – neither too high nor too low.Wait a few days too long, and it would probably be too late.
Paige Hake, the generation of the moment in her circle of relatives to tame this orchard, considered to be the cherry. Then he looked at his neighbors, with their own wind marks, in the sweltering heat of a June afternoon. He looked at the long row of green trees, bordered by a strip of white plastic cloth, intended to reflect sunlight off the bottom of the cherries, helping them color evenly. He has consulted with his father, Orlin Knutson, who has been growing fruit in this dry sagebrush steppe near Mattawa, Washington, for 41 years, the last 31 organically. There’s a refrigerated truck waiting through the door, with a developing pile of full containers next to it. Rain is in the forecast, as well as more heat, and the sugar degrees in the cherries rose as they spoke. They were looking for the cherries that are harvested today; They were far enough ahead that it is probably now or never, a full year of investment and paintings leading up to this afternoon. But it was getting late and there were plenty of other cherries to choose from, and today other people’s team had to pick them smaller than they would have liked. He turned to me and pointed to the windblown cherry tree, still unsure if it was worth looking to bring it to market. “Would you buy this at Whole Foods?” she asked.
Yellow cherry was one of many orchards in Washington state that were beginning to mature.Karen Lewis, who works with producers as an orchard fruit specialist for Washington State University’s agricultural extension service, has tried to accurately calculate how many individual cherries deserve to be chosen a swirling season that Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association, calls “eight weeks of madness.”By multiplying all millions of boxes by the amount of cherries they can contain, Lewis decided that up to 24 billion individual cherries will have to be collected separately from their trees and placed thoroughly in bags, buckets and containers, each through human hands.
Lewis believes that other people who used to think a lot about the source of their food, or who assume that food formula is as mechanized and well calibrated as a factory, spitting out products like so many Array gum bars deserve to spend a little. It is time to contemplate this number and what it means. “I’m here to tell you that other people don’t think that we harvest each and every and each and every one by hand,” he says. But hands, owned by a highly professional staff, are necessary for each and every cherry. During the harvest, thousands of other people are coming out at dawn almost each and every and each and every day, hands flying, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes under the dark trees. (In addition to the shortage of hard work, this is also the time when domain staff have to cut more than a hundred million apple trees by hand, so that the remaining fruit can grow more.) Season, many of the same hands pick and place each and every and each and each and every peach, plum and apricot, each and every and each and every apple – five and one part billion pounds, just apples, only in Washington, last year. “I think those numbers are amazing,” Lewis said.
The cherry industry has done its best to make the most of the overtime of the season.Growers sow at other altitudes: each and every one to a hundred feet above sea level, says an orchard manager, buys you an extra day until maturity.they decide on other types of grapes that mature at other speeds: the maximum red cherries are advertised to the public as “black sweets”, but in fact they are a genetically different range, whose other sizes and flavors and exclusive horticultural personalities are known in detail producers and collectors …If each and every thing were to flourish and mature at the same time, Lewis said, there would be no way there would be enough bees, enough trucks, enough containers to make the scale of the existing cherry crop possible.there wouldn’t be enough people. There’s none anymore.
For years, the orchard fruit industry in Washington, such as the salad industry in California, the blueberry industry in New Jersey, the tomato industry in Florida, and countless other resources. we eat – he struggles to find the staff he needs. to continue generating food. Across the country, the number of agricultural personnel is decreasing. The current staff, who are immigrants without legal authorization to paint in industries that have them, are aging; those who are capable of leaving an underpaid, physically damaging and exploitative industry; and the repression at the border means there are fewer newcomers to take their place. To deal with this, some manufacturers have turned to a visa-based “guest painter” program, which presents its own significant problems, while many others have gone into debt and increased costs, going bankrupt or selling out. their orchards to larger and larger companies. Fix “Everyone’s in a pretty hurry,” Knutson said, examining the dark leaves, the bright fruit, the transparent blue sky. “This is a terrible time.”
This is the situation before the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, which caused a number of new problems. When I called Lewis at the beginning of this year’s cherry harvest, she had just sent a newsletter that, along with the latest updates on cherry disease and apple varieties, included data on suicide prevention.Stacked on everything else, he said, “That’s enough to get other people on their knees.”
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