With juice grape prices so low, it’s hard to imagine growers would even consider spending money to thin their crop. But the practice paid off last year for some who turned their mechanical harvesters into thinning machines. Washington’s 2005 Concord grape crop will be remembered by many for a long time as “huge and long,” said Mike Concienne, senior regional manager at National Grape Cooperative, the processing arm of Welch’s grape products. The record crop, unofficially pegged at 280,000 tons, was so large that processors ran out of storage space and had to turn extra loads away. The crop was […]