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For the last few years, a new fruit company has been planting its roots in the Gorge commu-nity, taking practices mastered in South America and applying them to regional cherry orchards.

“About five years ago, my boss came up to scout the area and see what the US product and growing potential was,” said Ryan Durow, Director of Operations for Gid-dings Fruit USA, a subsidiary of Giddings Fruit Holding. “We wanted to understand the do-mestic market, and the idea was to discover what it was that we could do to add value to the area.”

Giddings Fruit specializes in the growing, handling, packing and exporting of Northwest cher-ries into China and other Asian countries. For the last two years, Giddings has packed cherries under their Cerasus label at Sta-delman Fruit in Zillah, Wash. But what brought them here?

“The question we always get is: Why are we up here?” said Durow. “We want to provide a

quality product to our buyers for as long as possible. We wanted to test if our model would work here, and we were able to prove it did; we maintained the prod-uct quality from the time it was picked through the time it was sold.”

The model Giddings uses in-volves offering two programs to growers, allowing them to hedge risk against the volatile North-west cherry season. The first is a quality-based ‘non-pooled’ ex-port program, while the second is a ‘pooled’ domestic program. The model compliments the production of large, high-quality cherries, and also supports the current volume-based domestic business.

Giddings works closely with growers before the fruit is even planted. “We work on breeding cherry varieties that come from specific lineages,” Durow ex-plained. “We work with a genet-icist, and now have commercial plantings of product with high

quality and post-harvest longev-ity. We also have a horticulturist in the area who moved here from Chile and works with our growers on their products.”

As to the future of Giddings, the concept of vertical integration—

growing their own fruit, having their own packing house—is in mind as a long-term goal. How-ever, their growth is dependent on their ability to maintain the quality of their product and their relationship with growers, and

that’s something they plan to stick to.

“We’re grower-focused,” said Durow. “Without them, our pro-gram doesn’t work. We have to start with them. We could pack our fruit elsewhere, but we want

to know where it comes from. We want to know how that grower grows the product, how its han-dled throughout the process. That’s the key for us: Being with the grower and knowing where the fruit comes from.”

Gidding Fruit USA exporting cherries under Cerasus labelCaleb Lundquist | The Dalles Chronicle

Photo by Mark B. Gibson

RYAN Durow stands with a box used to pack cherries under Giddings Fruit USA’s Cerasus label. In the background is his small cherry orchard on Fivemile Creek in The Dalles.


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The Auction Sales Co. grounds in The Dalles still show evidence of their roots as a live-stock auction. The old

sales arena with its high walls, where cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and more were once brought in for bidding, remains in ser-vice—although now it sports 8- by 8-foot video screens display-ing items up for bid. Old tack, saddles and guns are displayed on the inside wall, and some corral fencing remains outside, although animals have not been sold at auction here for years.

Today the corral fences in a wide range of items tagged and ready for a spring auction, one of three consignment auctions the company manages each year.

“We have everything,” said Evie Wilkinson, who helps run the show with her auction-eer husband Shawn Wilkin-son. “Antiques and collectibles, motor homes, lawn and garden, farm equipment.”

Each of the three auctions attracts items from all over Or-egon and Washington, with 100 to 250 people consigning items on average, she said.

Many of those items, like the livestock of times past, come from farmers and ranchers in rural areas. There are tractors, irrigation lines, fencing, cattle chutes and antique feed grind-ers.

An auction offers a good value, compared to other ways of selling items, like classified ads or antique shops. “The best

way to achieve true market value is in a competitive bidding atmosphere,” explained Auc-tioneer Shawn Wilkinson. “In an auction, we have to find not just somebody who values the item, but two somebodies who both want it.”

In times past, auctioneers would have gradually worked their way around the auction yard, taking bids as each item was sold. Today, the auctioneer works inside as items are dis-played on video monitors and buyers sit at ease. “Everyone can be comfortable, sit down and have coffee, and do their bidding.”

For the past eight years, the auction company has included online bidding as well as live bidding. Items are displayed online, and bidding opens mid-week before the weekend auc-tions. “Eighty percent of the items will have a bid in by live auction day,” Shawn noted.

Evie Wilkinson noted that a lot of people miss the weekly livestock auctions, which ended years ago. “It was a lot of work,” she said. The consignment auc-tions, she added, are 100 times the work—no, make that 200 times.

“But they only come three times a year,” she said.

This year’s spring auction was in April. The summer auc-tion is planned June 22-23, and the fall auction is Nov. 16-17. Auction Sales Co. is lo-cated at 1400 US 197, near The Dalles, and are online at www.auctionsalesco.com.

Auction yard still serves farmers, community


Photos by Mark B. Gibson

PICTURED this page, clockwise from top left: Bundles of 14-foot orchard ladders await bidders at Auction Sales Co.’s spring auc-tion; pedals of a Massey-Ferguson Deluxe 35 tractor shine like the grill of a classic car in a show; lichen grows on the body of this 8-foot steel wheel grain drill (no longer of practical use to the farmer, the picturesque machine could well attract a buyer with an eye to its beauty and history); a Massey-Ferguson Deluxe 35 tractor sports candy-red paint; and a warning label discourages letting over 1/4 inch of dirt build up in a jar, part of the air cleaning system on an International Super A gas tractor.FACING page, clockwise from top: A link chain wraps a gear on an 8-foot spring tooth with transport wheels; a detail of a 9-foot John Deere disc with hydraulic transport is pictured; a detail of a 3-point King Kutter landscape rake.


Several factors helped wheat crops fare well after the unusually long snow cover earlier this year. Mean-while, snow was not an issue for cherries—but the unusu-ally cold spring is, ag officials said.

Ashley Thompson, OSU fruit trees extension horti-

culturalist, said the snow itself was not an issue for cherries. “The plants weren’t active at that point, so the buds weren’t growing and developing, so the snow and cold weather we were having didn’t affect the buds at all. Now things aren’t warming up and that’s been the big

problem.”As to the wheat crop’s

hardiness, Sandy Macnab, professor emeritus of crop & soil science at Oregon State University, wrote recently in the OSU Extension’s Mid-Co-lumbia Farmer’s Newsletter that one factor is breeders select for cold tolerance in

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May 3, 2019 Moro Road Department 10am-2pmOctober 30, 2019 Hood River Garbage Service 10am-2pmOctober 31, 2109 The Dalles Disposal 10am-2pmNovember 1, 2019 Wasco, Events Center 10am-2pm Questions? Call Tri-County Program at (541)-506-2632, or visit our website www.tricountyrecycle.com

Pre-registration REQUIREDfor Agricultural Hazardous Waste Collection

Attention Farmers and Ranchers:Do you have containers of outdated agricultural chemicals sitting alongside your barn

or in a storage building? Due to the potent nature of agricultural chemicals, they cannotbe accepted at a regular Household HazardousWaste Collection event.

You can get rid of them safely at Tri-County HazardousWaste & Recycling Program’sannual Agricultural HazardousWaste Collections. Collection events for 2018 that canaccept AG chemicals:

October 31, 2018 Hood River Garbage Service 10am-2pmNovember 1, 2108 The Dalles Disposal 10am-2pmNovember 2, 2018 Wasco, Event Center 10am-2pm

Pre-registeration is required for agricultural producers so we can scheduleparticipants and have the proper collection and storage containers on hand.

Attention Farmers and Ranchers: Do you have containers of outdated agricultural chemicals sitting alongside your barn or in a storage building? Due to the potent nature of agricultural chemicals, they cannot be accepted at a regular Household Hazardous Waste Collection event. You can get rid of them safely at Tri-County Hazardous Waste & Recycling Program’s annual Agricultural Hazardous Waste Collections. Collection events for 2019 that can accept AG chemicals:

Snow had little effect on crops

Neita Cecil | The Dalles Chronicle

Mark B. Gibson/file

ICE DRIPS from cherry flowers in 2013, when extreme cold in April killed many trees in the region. This year’s February snow had little impact, although cooler temperatures since will delay harvest.


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their wheats.Also crucial is that when

the snow hit, it came on un-frozen ground.

“The snow acts like a blan-ket, protecting the young leaves from the hard-biting cold that frequently follows,” Macnab wrote. A long cold snap in late winter saw snow on the ground for much of February.

Even at freezing tempera-tures, wheat continues to grow, even if growth is dra-matically slowed.

But when the snow melted, the now exposed wheat was already growing “and you may have noticed, it was big-ger and heavier than before the snow. It grew slowly, but it grew.”

He said wheat doesn’t take long to respond once snow disappears. “It’s been laying with its engine running wait-ing to be released,” he said.

The snow did slow things down, however. “We’re run-ning later than normal by

the calendar, so the wheat will soon be shifting from the vegetative mode to the reproductive mode. That’s when the plant stops putting so much effort into growing. So you might expect your grain to stand a little shorter this summer.”

Thompson has been track-ing growing degree-days (GDD’s) for cherries.

GDD’s are a more a reliable method of predicting crop and insect development than calendar days. The thresh-old, or base temperature, is the temperature under which no significant crop develop-ment is expected.

The base temperature dif-fers from crop to crop, and for cherries, it’s 41 degrees, Thompson said. The count-ing clock for degree-days starts on Jan. 1 for cherries.

She said that in some areas, cherries are seeing about half the degree-days you’d typically have for this time of year.

“It just means a later har-vest, but that can have some economic implications for growers in our region be-cause we’re always trying to get our harvest date earlier and earlier,” Thompson said.

The ideal is to hit the mar-ket when there’s not already a glut of cherries, which drives the price down.

Thompson monitors a number of weather stations all over the Gorge, and OSU has 30 years of data. “Right now, we are 11 days behind 2018, but we’re only two days behind our 30-year average” for growing degree-days, she said.

It’s six days behind the 10-year average.

“Over the long term, we’re not that far behind. So if peo-ple were thinking, ‘Oh man, we were so far ahead—we were,” she said. Last year, cherries were anywhere from 11 to 21 days ahead of the 30-year average.


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a publication of the dalles chroniclefarm ranch€¦ · introducing jason & ben pictured from r...

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