Leisa Eckerle-Hankins got tired of all the doom and gloom around the Michigan cherry industry. So she’s doing her part to change the narrative.

This spring, Eckerle-Hankins founded the Michigan Cherry Grower Alliance, a cadre of Michigan cherry farmers. The goal, she says, is to provide a place where stakeholders from throughout the state can meet, talk about challenges, and brainstorm ways to make things better.

Cherries are in Eckerle-Hankins’ DNA. She’s the fifth-generation heir to a family cherry farm in Leelanau County. She also owns Traverse City-based Benjamin Twiggs, a gift store that revolves around locally-produced cherry products, from dried cherries to jams to salsas. Her 81-year-old father, Jim Eckerle, is still farming – and doing so alongside her 25-year-old son, who plans to take over the family farm.

But things have gotten a bit precarious in recent years for families like the Eckerles. Tart cherry prices are low, making it difficult to turn a profit on the notoriously difficult-to-grow fruit. Imports from foreign countries like Turkey have made the cherry market less hospitable to domestic growers, and government bodies have mostly declined to regulate those foreign trade matters through tariffs. And thanks to a mix of invasive species and climate change, bad harvest years have become th norm.

Eckerle-Hankins doesn’t deny these challenges are serious: This summer, her dad lost a whopping 97 percent of his sweet cherry crop, and he was far from the only local cherry farmer who had a dismal harvest. What Eckerle-Hankins does deny is the growing belief that northern Michigan’s days as the Cherry Capital of the World are numbered. She started the Michigan Cherry Grower Alliance to combat that narrative.

The seed for the alliance was planted last summer when Pulcipher Orchards, a long-running cherry farm in Williamsburg, uprooted all its cherry trees. “After 150 years, an Up North cherry orchard calls it quits” read the headline in the Detroit Free Press. For some, Eckerle-Hankins tells the Leelanau Ticker, that news rang as a death knell for the entire Michigan cherry industry.

“I had started working with [local marketing consultant] Shea Petaja at the time, and I said to Shea, ‘We can’t let this be our narrative,’” Eckerle-Hankins says. “And her response to me was, ‘OK, what are we going to do about it?’”

Soon, Eckerle-Hankins and Petaja were sending out invitations asking cherry farmers from across the region and throughout the state to attend an informal summit.

“I set up a meeting out at Townline Ciderworks [in Williamsburg] in March, expecting about 25 people to show up,” Eckerle-Hankins says. “We got 65.”

While there was an element of commiseration to those initial meetings – “That first day, we just asked everyone to share all the issues that have bothered them,” Eckerle-Hankins says – the goal was never to dwell on the bad things, but to sketch out a road map to get past them. “For the next meeting, we prioritized all the issues that been mentioned. Pricing was number one. Two was marketing of the fruit. Three and four were both about relationships – relationships in the industry and relationships with processors. And then we came around the table and came up with a whole list of questions around those issues and how they might be addressed.”

In Eckerle-Hankins’ view, cherry farmers love to talk, but have historically not been great about turning that into action.

“Growers have not had a voice for a long time,” she says. “I think they’ve sat back because they’re farmers, and they just want to be out in the orchard. I thought, if we came up with a list of issues and questions, that could be a way of coming together and having more of a voice for change in the industry.”

By month three, the alliance was inviting representatives from the Cherry Marking Institute (CMI) and the Cherry Industry Administrative Board (CIAB) to hear their concerns. Those conversations were valuable, and Eckerle-Hankins already sees signs her group has “been heard” by industry leaders. One example, she says, is a push within the CIAB to find new market prospects for cherry growers to pursue.

“For probably the last 15 years, we haven't increased our sales as an industry,” Eckerle-Hankins notes. “We are stuck at the same 200-250 million pounds of cherries being sold on an annual basis. And so, one of the big things we need to do is sell more cherries. How do we do that? Well, CIAB has had the same marketing firm for 15-16, years. And this year, because there has been so much talk about how we haven’t gone anywhere, the CIAB decided to hire a new firm. I think that will be a very positive thing.”

The search for new avenues is happening locally, too. Eckerle-Hankins says the alliance is working to develop fresh relationships with local restaurants to get more cherry-related dishes on menus. Also in the works: a partnership with the Traverse City Pit Spitters and a project aimed at bringing the world record for the biggest cherry pie in history back to Traverse City. The latter effort has been talked about for years and is currently shelved, but could come back next summer thanks to a push from cherry growers, Eckerle-Hankins says.

The alliance is also hoping to propel change at the legislative level – whether that’s bigger tariffs on imports, better pricing for tart cherries, or other farmer-friendly policies. The group has so far interacted with U.S. Senator Gary Peters, U.S. Representative Jack Bergman, and State Rep Betsy Coffia (among others), and hopes to prioritize similar conversations this fall once legislative bodies are back in session.

By playing all these different angles, Eckerle-Hankins is optimistic the alliance can save northern Michigan’s cherry industry.

“People say, ‘Is the Cherry Capital going away?’ No!” she says. “In Michigan, we still produce over 100 million pounds of a cherry. Utah produces 35 million. So, we're not going to lose that status. But it's important for us to change the narrative. We have to look at the positives and at what we can do to move forward.”

Pictured: Eckerle-Hankins (left); alliance members give Jack Bergman an orchard tour (right)