Mich. farmer: Dumping perfectly good cherries is rotten

Keith Matheny | Detroit Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Santucci Farms in Traverse City shaking cherries to the ground Santucci Farms in Traverse City shaking cherries to the ground – where they’ll be left to rot.

DETROIT — A Michigan tart cherry farmer is leaving 14% of his crop this year to rot on the ground to comply with an industry marketing agreement intended to keep cherry prices stable. And he's not happy about it.

A frustrated Marc Santucci, who grows about 30 acres of cherries on his 80-acre Traverse City farm, put a photo of the dumped cherries, thick on the ground, on Facebook Tuesday — and the photo had been shared nearly 38,000 times as of Thursday afternoon.

"These cherries are beautiful!" Santucci posted with the photo. "But, we have to dump 14% of our tart cherry crop on the ground to rot. Why? So we can allow the import of 200 million pounds of cherries from overseas! It just doesn't seem right."

Contacted Thursday, Santucci said limitations on the amount of cherries he can sell are "a vain attempt to prop up the price of cherries."

"My concern is, we're trying to limit the supply here, but all that does is increase imports," he said.

At issue is a marketing order imposed through the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of the federal Agricultural Agreement Act of 1937. But that law only applies to the tart cherry industry because growers and processors opted into the order in 1995.

"It was created at the industry's behest. It was voted in by growers and processors. It's not an imposition from outside," said Perry Hedin, executive director of the DeWitt-based Cherry Industry Administrative Board, which oversees the marketing order not only in Michigan but in all states across the country that produce commercial crops of red tart cherries, including New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin.

Tart cherries are one of the most volatile crops grown in the U.S., with yields that can vary dramatically year to year, Hedin said.

"This whole concept of the marketing order has two goals: to inject a better stability into our markets and improve grower returns," he said. "The growers have been paid far better prices under the marketing order over the past 20 years than they were before the order was in place."

Each year, the board, made up of handlers and growers and with representation from each growing state, looks at cherry supply-and-demand dynamics. For years when there are surplus cherries, "that surplus has to be withheld from the domestic market," Hedin said.

It was a booming tart cherry crop this year — the third largest in the past 20 years, an estimated 351 million pounds. That meant a surplus of 101 million pounds, Hedin said.

Processors' options in times of surplus include holding the restricted cherries in surplus — frozen, dried or concentrated — for a later slow year. Farmers also can attempt to sell the surplus cherries in overseas markets or sell them domestically in a newly created market, either in a new product or by convincing a supermarket chain or other end user currently supplied by imported cherries to switch to U.S.-grown, he said.

But Santucci said imported tart cherry concentrate from Turkey and Eastern Europe is increasingly making inroads into the U.S. market — and undercutting American growers and processors.

"If I have to sell these excess cherries for less, I might not make that much more," he said. "But if we're ever going to stop the increase in imports, we've got to compete with them head to head on every cherry we produce. If we don't do that, we're leaving the market wide open to them."

Hedin, however, said the American tart cherry industry has focused on retail markets, rather than the industrial markets the foreign producers tend to target.

"We don't produce enough concentrate in the entire United States to satisfy the demand of the import product," he said. "The import product is coming in at 200 million pounds per year, and we're producing 30 million to 50 million pounds.

"Even if we took our whole crop in many years, we couldn't satisfy that demand. It's not a competitive market for us."

Hedin said Santucci could have worked with the board to find a place to donate the surplus cherries, which typically aren't eaten raw like sweet cherries because of their very short shelf-life, but are instead used in products such as pie filling and jams.

Ben LaCross, who grows tart cherries on an 800-acre farm in Cedar, expressed support for the marketing order.

"It's not price-fixing; it may be price-stabilizing," he said. "But it's also industry-stabilizing, and has proven to be useful in helping growers develop stable returns."

Dumping cherries on the ground is a self-regulating option "which no farmer wants to do," but it sometimes happens, he said.

"It's help in managing our crop for the long-term benefit of the industry — that's what the marketing order is designed to do, and that's what it does," LaCross said. "That's what's important for growers; not one person's emotionally charged Facebook post."

Santucci said the response to his post has been "almost all positive," and he hopes the cherry board and USDA consider alternatives, going to Congress if necessary.

"Dropping cherries on the ground isn't going to change" the increasing low-cost cherry import dynamic, "and will probably only encourage it," he said.

Follow Keith Matheny on Twitter: @keithmatheny