Washington state: Cold weather crushes local produce

Cold weather crushes local produce - MyNorthwest.com

Statewide, the unseasonably cool weather is damaging crops from Whatcom County to the Wenatchee Valley.

"The small grains, wheat, barley and oats, and row crops as well, are developing really slowly because of the cold weather. With the fruit crops such as, sweet cherries, Bartlett pears, any type of adverse conditions, such the frost days in April, were really detrimental to those crops," says Dennis Koontz, Deputy Director of the U.S. Agriculture Department's statistics survey in Olympia.

Koontz says the cherry crop got nailed this spring. "100,000 tons is our forecast at this time. It's down a little over 40-percent from last year's crop. What really hit cherry producers hard was a frost in mid-April during the bloom period."