The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: A Progress Report And Season Forecast From Cherry Alliance Leader

2012 and 2024: Ask a northern Michigan cherry grower to name their worst years in recent memory, and those two will likely top the list. The former saw a total crop failure on the tart cherry side, while last year was so dire for sweet cherries it prompted the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to issue a disaster declaration for the Michigan cherry industry.

If there was a silver lining amidst 2024’s doldrums, though, it may have been the creation of the Michigan Cherry Grower Alliance, a cadre of Michigan cherry growers working together for a brighter industry future. Northern Michigan’s Leisa Eckerle-Hankins founded that group, and a year in, she says progress has been strong – despite new challenges lurking.

Eckerle-Hankins started the Cherry Grower Alliance to counter a pervasive feeling of doom and gloom in the industry. Last March, she gathered 65 cherry growers from throughout the state at Townline Ciderworks in Williamsburg. The group only grew from there, pulling in more growers for monthly meetings, catching the attention of lawmakers like U.S. Senator Gary Peters, U.S. Representative Jack Bergman, and State Rep Betsy Coffia, and even bending the ear of industry groups like the Cherry Marketing Institute (CMI) and the Cherry Industry Administrative Board (CIAB).

Fast-forward to April 2025, and the Cherry Grower Alliance seems to be triggering some real change at the industry level. This year, the CIAB and CMI named a new president and hired a new marketing firm, both things the Alliance pushed for. The new president, Amy Cohn, is a dietician who spent nearly 20 years working for General Mills and has a history of identifying new product markets through a lens of health and nutrition. The new marketing agency, Curious Plot, works exclusively within the food, agriculture, and companion animal sectors, and is a subsidiary of the well-known Land O’Lakes agricultural cooperative.

“We’re excited to be on a new track,” Eckerle-Hankins says on behalf of the Cherry Grower Alliance. “In particular, I think we’re excited for the opportunity to work with Curious Plot. We’d had the same marketing approach for the cherry industry for like 15 years, and it just felt like things hadn't moved forward. They were still kind of stale. Curious Plot, and their connection to agriculture, we feel will be a good fit for the industry. I think they are really focused on the right things to get people to purchase more cherries.”

Identifying new markets and customers and selling more cherries would certainly make an impact, but perhaps the biggest thing the Cherry Grower Alliance is working toward is more favorable pricing.

“We’ve had frank discussions about pricing, and the bottom-line takeaway was that 30-35 cents per pound [for tart cherries] is probably the minimum of what we can survive on as growers,” Eckerle-Hankins tells The Ticker. “For perspective, we’ve been seeing prices from 12 to 20 cents, so there’s a ways to go, but there’s also some consensus now, and a feeling that we know where we need to go.”

While 2024 was awful, it might actually help the state’s tart cherry growers command higher prices for their 2025 crops. A bad crop year leads the industry to dip into whatever reserve product it has in storage. Pulling on that lifeline can mean that poor growing years like 2024 go largely unnoticed by the general public, at least in the moment. But that lifeline can only be used once, and when the reserves are gone, the need for new product shoots up, giving cherry growers a more favorable negotiating position.

“We've heard that is most of the cherries that have been in storage have been sold, and that’s a good thing, because it will bring the price up a little bit,” Eckerle-Hankins says.

Of course, that situation also creates more pressure for cherry growers to produce a strong crop in 2025. But there’s good news on that front, too – or at least some favorable signs.

“The weather has been cool, so right now, we’re really not seeing this being an early season [for the cherry crop],” Eckerle-Hankins notes. “Last year, we were two weeks ahead, which was not good because then you really had worry about a late freeze. We had a couple decent warm-up days this spring, but nothing in the 80s that would cause blossoms to come out too early. We obviously don’t know what will happen between now and May, but right now, it looks like we're going into a normal spring setting of blossoms.”

While Eckerle-Hankins is optimistic about the future, there are a few storm clouds ahead, including tariffs and how they could end up affecting farmers when the dust finally settles.

“When we look at potash, which is a fertilizer that we use, 85 percent of it is coming from Canada, and now, Canada has put a retaliatory tariff on that,” she says. “Yes, they’re building a potash facility in Michigan, but they're talking about five years for that facility to be up and running. What do we do in the meantime? Well, we're getting hit. We’re already struggling because of the extra costs. That’s frustrating, because we’re already not getting paid enough, and now you’re taking more money out of our farming.”