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 Sweet Cherries
We have 25 acres of Sweet Cherries on this farm with a potential for producing 70 tons. We are gradually changing over to dwarf sweet stock and plan to be completely changed over by the year 2000. Some of our varieties are Hartland, Royalton, Emperor Francis, Hedelfingen, Ulster, Starkgold, Hudson Cavalier and Sam. We sell our Sweet Cherries wholesale, retail and U-Pick, Most of the cherries are sold as fresh to stores, markets and direct to the consumers. A very small percentage goes for the process market and most of those are for maraschino cherries.
The majority of our sweet cherries are picked by hand. We normally have to use about 15 hand harvesters that stay right here on the farm from June to November. They do most of the harvest work, however we need about ten more for the harvest of Sweet Cherries because of the labor intensive nature of the crop.
Tart Cherries
(Sour Cherries)
We grow approximately 10 acres of Sour Cherries considerably less than what we used to grow (25 acres) mainly because of lower demand for the product for processing. We have a potential of producing 25 to 30 tons of Tart Cherries. Most of our tart cherries are harvested for the process market. We are part owners of WNY Cherry Growers Cooperative located on Drake Settlement Road in Burt that processes our cherries. This plant sorts, pits and packages the cherries into 25 pound containers with 5 pounds of sugar on top (5+1). Then the cherries are placed unto a refrigerated truck and transported to a large freezer in Buffalo New York where they will stay until they are sold. Our organization belongs to another coop in Michigan called Cherry Central. They do all the selling of our product out of the freezer.
Retail customers can purchase these packaged tart cherries fresh if they order ahead at (716) 778-8396
Ninety-five percent of our Tart Cherries are harvested using a specialized machine that shakes the tree and then catches the cherries on a canvas. On a good day we can harvest about 35 - 45 tons of cherries. It only takes a partial day for the harvest of our Tart Cherries using the machine.
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