The second day of the Washington Tree Fruit Association’s annual meeting kicked off with well-attended sessions on cherry production and technology. 

Cherry grower Norm Gutzwiler kicked off the cherry session imploring growers not to pick fruit that won’t cover their picking and packing costs. He also cautioned that too many growers misestimate picking costs — either by failing to consider the wages of support staff, such as drivers and checkers, and the associated harvest costs ranging from fuel to portable toilets; or by failing to consider that they only get paid on packed fruit. 

“Eleven-row cherries are not going to make your picking costs, and you haven’t made any money for your pruning, for your taxes,” he said. 

He encouraged growers to focus on growing bigger cherries that can deliver returns by pruning hard, reducing yields and using GA.

“If you have to cut down to 6 to 7 tons per acre until you get some young wood back, so be it,” he said. “We’ve got too many trees in the ground, folks.”

The challenge in making the economic decision to pick or not is that growers rarely have the full picture on pricing at that time, said Welcome Sauer, a retired fruit executive who shared an economic analysis of the 2025 season. 

“We can’t take Norm’s advice without better data,” Sauer said. 

The 2025 season offers a good example of the problem he highlighted. 

“The initial FOB prices look pretty normal, but it didn’t turn out that way because of adjustments and the way the market went,” he said. 

Sauer contends that the cherry market is more predictable than many in the industry make it out to be, and dynamic pricing can hurt growers more than it helps. 

“It’s a very good correlation between supply and price. We can plan on that, we can work with our retailers and plan together,” he said. “So, the question is: How do we deal with the periods when the retail price is high and supplies are short and we need to set up for later in the season to move the volume? That becomes the dilemma.” 

Next, Washington State University cherry physiologist Matt Whiting shared insights from over 20 years of research into mechanical cherry harvest. His conclusion: Mechanically assisted shake-and-catch prototypes have proven the ability to deliver a far more efficient harvest with no meaningful increase in defects. He also determined consumers appear receptive to stemless cherries. The approach just needs commercial champions. 

The technology session at the annual meeting was highlighted by live demonstrations of artificial intelligence presented by Gwen Hoheisel of Washington State University and Kragworks, a Yakima-based ag software and data services provider 

Hoheisel, an extension specialist, walked growers through prompting ChatGPT to create a checklist for a new Quantum Mist sprayer based on a 54-page owner’s manual, likening her interaction with the computer program to one she might have with an intern.

She spent about 12 minutes crafting the prompt, giving the bot information about her role, context, goal, examples and format. She posed as a farm manager with a new sprayer and wanted a checklist for daily operations. She fed it websites about generic spray maintenance and operations and told it to segregate the bullet points for daily, weekly and winterizing tasks. She even instructed it to ask her up to five questions to help inform its answer, then typed: “This is a lot to review, so please take your time.”

She and the audience were pleased with the checklist, which broke down the info for 200- and 500-hour milestones, as well as the parameters she initially sought.

Matt Yeager, owner of Kragworks, and his father, Joel, an orchardist, used real data from their Yakima Valley farm to ask Claude, a large language model AI program from Anthropic, to estimate FOB prices based on fruit size and other metrics. Taking audience questions, Yager told it to search for more accurate fruit millimeter/box size conversion charts and other details, massaging the answers each time. He then asked it to explain and justify its answers.

Hoheisel and Yeager stressed checking the AI programs’ work.

“Be the human in the loop,” Yeager said.

Other parts of the tech session included grower panels on irrigation and heat stress automation and the use of task maps for crop load management, as well as updates on the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission technology roadmap and the WSU Smart Orchard projects. •