Cherry farmers to support health benefit research

Cherry farmers to support health benefit research
March 17, 2006

ASSOCIATED PRESS

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) -- Tart cherry growers will pick up the tab for a stepped-up research and marketing campaign to promote the fruit as a health food.

The Cherry Industry Administrative Board on Thursday approved a five-year assessment on the nation's tart cherry producers. The 'research and promotion initiative' will charge growers a half-penny per pound to raise millions of dollars for promoting cherries and studying possible medicinal benefits.

An estimated 110-plus million pounds of tart cherries were grown in northwest Michigan last year. That's more than half the estimated 190 million pounds produced in Michigan, which annually has more than three-quarters of the nation's total harvest.

The Food and Drug Administration last fall warned 29 companies selling cherry products such as juice concentrate and dried cherries not to make unproven claims that they treat or prevent ailments such as heat disease or arthritis.

Bob Gregory, a Suttons Bay farmer, said the assessment will cost his grower cooperative up to $140,000 a year but said it was a good investment.

'There's no doubt it's a pile of money,' he told the Traverse City Record-Eagle for a Friday story. 'But in order to get the message out, we can't do it alone.'

Leelanau County extension director Jim Bardenhagen said the assessment will further squeeze local growers' already-thin profit margins. But he said it's no time to cut back on efforts to find more outlets for tart cherries.

'We still produce more cherries than we can sell,' he said.

Gregory said cherry producers need to find a 'balancing act' between general marketing and promotion of cherries to consumers, and to get medical verification that cherries are beneficial.

'We need to entice the medical community to take this to the next level of clinical analysis,' Gregory said. 'We have not been able to take the story of the health benefits of cherries and carry that forward to the consumers at large.'

The assessment is collected through cherry processors and should raise around $1 million per year depending on the size of the national cherry harvest, said Perry Hedin of the administrative board. A nine-member committee from the administrative board and the Cherry Marketing Institute will set up and oversee the program.

Hedin said board members polled in recent weeks showed around 70 percent support for a growers surcharge."