Welcome back as we feature specialty crops across Wisconsin and the farm families who grow them.
Today, the cherry harvest takes us to Door County where we visit with Jim Seaquist of Seaquist Orchards. They care for 170,000 trees across 1,300 acres around Sister Bay. They harvest up to 15 million pounds of cherries each year.
Despite early weather challenges, Seaquist says the orchard is expecting a bumper crop.
“It’s quite surprising to us because we had a spring frost in April that was pretty significant,” he says. “The pollination must have just been perfect and anything viable seemed to predominantly set fruit. It’s quite a consistent and good crop all over.”
He says the high amount of rainfall this summer has made the fruit mature and get to size. For the harvest season through early August, he’s hoping for dry weather.
“We’d love to see under 10-mile-an-hour winds every day, nice and cool and dry air, and I think we’ve got enough rain to get us through harvest,” he says. “It could not rain anymore and we would be just fine.”
Seaquist explains that today’s cherry market is volatile. He says agricultural tourism has allowed his family to continue the farm business. Since the early 1900s, his family has expanded not only in the number of trees but also in the number of offerings. Today, you can find their products year-round: pie fillings, jams and jellies, and syrups and sauces, to name a few.
Learn more about how to engage with Wisconsin’s agricultural tourism industry at https://gowiagtourism.com/.
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This podcast series is courtesy of Specialty Crop Block Grant 23-10.
