If You Could Plant Any Type Of Fruit, Consider A Caneberry [Opinion]
January 23, 2015 
As I travel around this great country, I’m occasionally asked by growers for my opinion on what crop they should plant next. Of course I usually already know some salient information about them, such as the size of their operation, where they farm and what they already grow.
Those details and a lot more, such as how old they are, have a lot of impact on my answer. For example, the old saw, “Plant pears for your heirs” pops into my head if it’s an older grower. Not that it’s true, I personally think pears have some possibility in the near term.
Just check out “Heard Down The Row” on Page 6 of this issue. When your fruit is favored by rappers, it is definitely a sign that it is a part of pop culture.
Or ask Bruce Grim, who said as much in December at the last meeting of association he led, the Washington State Horticultural Association. That association, along with three others, was folded into the Washington State Tree Fruit Association.
But if I didn’t know a darn thing about the grower, and I had to pick one single fruit, I think I’d opt for the blackberry. I got to thinking about this in January when I was attending the Southeast Regional Fruit and Vegetable Conference in Savannah, GA. There I attended talks on peaches, as it is the Peach State, after all.
But just a couple of months ago it was announced that blueberries had surpassed peaches in Georgia farm gate value, and I caught some blueberry talks too.
Both sessions were well-attended, but the attendance was nothing compared to that for caneberries. That session had to be moved to a bigger room because there were so many people there. (To read some of my Tweets on berries from that conference, see Page 44.)
If you don’t believe me on how popular caneberries are getting, just ask Charlie O’Dell. He’s our berry expert, and in this issue on Page 40, he extols the health benefits of berries in general, and caneberries in particular. Blueberry sales soared after a Harvard University researcher dubbed it the “brainberry,” so it will be interesting to see what all the recent studies will do for caneberry sales.
I think they’re already having an impact. At another conference about a year ago I got to talking to a fella who is in charge of buying produce for a large supermarket chain, and he said his biggest growth sector, by far, was berries. And the fastest rising berry of them all? Blackberries.
Not that growing them is for the faint of heart. Exactly one year ago, I profiled a California blackberry grower named Erik Jertberg for a cover story. A sharp young man – he’s one of our GenNext Growers – Erik told me that what with all the trellising and hoop houses, it costs him a whopping $30,000 an acre to grow blackberries.
Now I’m not saying everybody should go out and plant berries this year. One of the very biggest tree fruit growers in the U.S., West Mathison of Washington’s Stemilt Growers, said berry growing didn’t work out for them.
Also, the herd mentality certainly doesn’t pay off for everyone. Some of the best growers I know are contrarians. I qualify as an expert on being a contrarian, because an eddy, by definition, moves counter to the main current.
But give berry growing some thought, because the amount of money consumers are going to be spending on berries is going to soar in the next decade, you watch.
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