(Nov. 8) WENATCHEE, Wash. — There will be no late harvest of Washington apples this season.

Nature has seen to that.

“If there were any apples on the trees, they’re gone,” said Ron Eakin, secretary for Eakin Fruit Co., a grower-shipper in Yakima.

An arctic air mass blew through the heart of Washington’s apple-growing region in the last week of October and froze as many as 4 million boxes worth of unpicked apples, according to estimates by the Wenatchee-based Washington Apple Commission.

This freeze — with sustained nighttime temperatures in the teens in some areas — will cut into a U.S. apple crop that already had been predicted to be smaller than normal.

Pre-season estimates placed the national apple crop at its lowest level since 1986. Because of cold weather in the spring, production in Michigan and New York is down 25% from last year. Washington, which produces about 70% of the U.S. supply of fresh-market apples, now expects to harvest just a few more apples than it did a year ago.

“Our forecast estimates the Washington crop will still be up a couple of percentage points compared to last year, but it certainly won’t be as large a crop as we had expected,” said Welcome Sauer, president of the commission.

DROPPING ESTIMATES

The freeze cut Washing-ton’s pre-season estimate from 88.8 million boxes — which represented a 6% increase from last year — to 84.8 million.

Fujis, originally estimated at 12.6 million boxes, could shrink to less than 10 million, according to an informal industry survey.

The pink lady harvest, originally estimated at 710,000 boxes, could be cut to about 250,000, Sauer said, adding that as much as two-thirds of the state’s pink lady crop was still on the trees at the time of the freeze.

Growers expect the final crop estimate to be available by December.

Given the strong demand for certain late-season varieties, prices will be higher this year, most dramatically for pink ladies, said Mike Taylor, domestic sales manager for Wenatchee-based Stemilt Growers Inc.

“It’s a real wild card,” Taylor said of the pink lady variety. “The few we have will be highly sought after.”

He said prices for 40-pound cartons of pink ladies likely would reach the “$40 range,” compared to the high $20s a year ago.

Fuji prices, which are currently $22-24 for sizes 72-80, likely would edge up by, perhaps, $4-5, Taylor said.

“I think you’ll see the range more like $26-30 going forward,” he said. “There will be a firming of the price, but not a complete restructuring.”

NO SURVIVORS

Growers say the frozen fruit is not salvageable and will not be harvested.

“We got everything in the barn before that big freeze came down, but not everybody did,” said Randy Steensma, marketing manager for Wenatchee-based Honeycrisp Apple Growers & Marketing Co. “Some of them are our neighbors.”

As much as 95% of the state’s crop already had been harvested, but late-season varieties, like fuji and pink lady, were still on the trees.

Fujis will account for three-quarters of the loss, Sauer said.

“Our state’s fuji crop could now be down by 2.7 million boxes, or 20% from what we had expected to harvest just a week ago,” he said.

The freeze also hit other late-season varieties, such as granny smith and braeburn.

“It was just sickening to look at the fruit that was not only not fresh but totally out of any processor potential,” Eakin said. “So it went from good quality fresh one week to totally unutilizable and thus unharvestable a week later.”