LAKE ERIE REGION Grape growers to be paid for loss

They have to meet various standards of the cooperatives that buy the grapes.
By ALLISON SCHLESINGER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
PITTSBURGH -- For the first time in at least 40 years, a cooperative that is the largest buyer of grapes grown in the Lake Erie region will pay its members $600 for every acre they cannot harvest due to the wet, cold growing season.
Grape growers who tend more than 30,000 acres in the Lake Erie grape belt, which includes northwest Pennsylvania, southwest New York and a small section of Ohio, are hoping the next 10 days bring enough sunshine and warmth to boost the sugar content in their grapes and turn around a bleak season. Many growers have delayed the harvest of their Concord grape crops by about two weeks in hopes the fruit will have a chance to ripen.
Considering the market demands for grapes of a certain sweetness to make jellies, juices and other products and realizing growers need an income this year to stay in the business next year, National Grape Cooperative Association Inc., the owner of Welch Foods Inc., has agreed to compensate members for any failed portion of crop.
Growers can sell their crops for $1,400 to $2,000 an acre, depending on the condition of the grapes in the region and other variables, said Barry Shaffer, a business management specialist with the Lake Erie Regional Grape Program.
"This is a case of Mother Nature playing out her worse-case scenario for us," said Tom Davenport, director of viticulture for the cooperative. "There's nothing that the growers could have done to avoid this situation. If the growers did do something wrong, the cooperative wouldn't have felt an obligation to help out."
Larger crop
The region, which ranks second in the nation for grape production, behind California and ahead of Washington state, had a larger crop this year than last year. Bigger crops, however, require more sunlight and heat than the weather provided this year for photosynthesis to produce carbohydrates in the fruit, Davenport said.
A wet, cool spring got the season off to a slow start, and ideal weather in the early part of the summer boosted the region's grape crop, Shaffer said. But then, it started raining in the middle of the summer and didn't seem to stop, he said.
Growers have already harvested their Niagara grapes, a type of white grape, and a few growers have harvested a portion of their Concord grapes for use in wineries, which pick grapes based on their acidity rather than their sweetness, said John Griggs, facility manager of the Lake Erie Regional Grape Research and Extension Center.
Sugar concentration
The region's grape growers usually have contracts to sell their fruit to cooperatives, cash markets or other processors, who have different ripening standards. A benchmark for Concord grapes hovers around 15 on the Brix scale, which measures the concentration of sugar in the fruit.
As of last Thursday, the average sugar concentration for grapes grown in the region sat at 14 on the Brix scale, but some crops measured as low as 12 and others as high as 15, Davenport said. Growers are now left to wait.
Ideally, growers would like to start their Concord grape harvest by the last days of September and pick them by the end of October to ensure that they avoid a frost. But it looks like most growers will start their Concord harvest on Thursday and wrap it up in November.
"Concord grapes are one of the area's latest crops, so we're always on the edge. This year it's close," Davenport said.
But Griggs isn't writing off the season. If the region experiences a belated Indian summer, as the forecast promises, the large crop could ripen just in time for an excellent harvest, he said.
"This is one of those seasons that everything that could go wrong went wrong," Griggs said. "A lot depends on the next 10 days."