Blackberries Commercially Grown Pt 1

Blackberries Commercially Grown Pt 1

Bob Larson
Bob Larson
With today's Fruit Grower Report, I'm Bob Larson. Blackberries are a wild berry that we love to pick and enjoy while out hiking about in rural areas, right? Well, yeah, but who knew, blackberries are also a big commercial crop here in the Pacific Northwest...

TOM PEERBOLT ... "We certainly do. We've got a very large, well, everything's relative obviously. It's probably small on some scales, but we produce up to I think our high has been 60-million pounds a couple of years ago of blackberries, almost exclusively west side of Oregon, and it almost, probably 95% of it goes for processed."

Northwest Berry Foundation Executive Director Tom Peerbold says like other berry crops, there are fresh and processed blackberries ...

TOM PEERBOLT ... "There's a very large fresh blackberry industry that you see in the stores, like Driscoll's and some of the others, centered down in California. But, yeah, we've got a very large processed, machine harvested blackberry industry."

I told Tom I've loved blackberries since I was a kid when we would go on our annual berry picking excursions with my grandparents up the South-Fork of the Walla Walla River...

TOM PEERBOLT ... "It's a great crop. I mean, I really love working with it and it has an amazing amount of versatile qualities and different cultivars. So, I think a lot of people have very good memories about it and are unaware of how large the actual industry is for growing them."

Listen tomorrow for more on the northwest blackberries industry and where most of these thorny delights are grown.

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