Kropf pleased by 2015 apple prospects
Kropf pleased by 2015 apple prospects
“We’re coming into a pretty good year. Everything is great” at Core Farms LLC, said the firm’s owner, Roger Kropf.
“The growers are all fired up,” he said. “They all want to get the money flowing. It seems there is a good atmosphere in the air.”
Last year brought a variety of problems that were indirectly related to the apple business in Michigan but were harmful nonetheless. There was the West Coast longshoreman’s strike, which affected apple exports. Exports also suffered because the Russian border was shut down, Kropf noted. And the 2014 deal faced an excessively large crop in the Western U.S. “Everything multiplies,” he said. “We were caught in the middle of a fight that we weren’t fighting.”
Kropf credits Western apple grower-shippers for typically managing to avoid two consecutive bad marketing years. This is significant for the U.S. apple marketing community and a reason why this season “should be better for us all.”
At Core Farms, “We are just doing the same process,” he said. “We’re steady as we go here” at the firm, which is based in Hartford, MI. “I’m feeling pretty confident. We have a fair amount of interest from our customers. I have a good feeling about the way we’ll start here.”
Kropf expects the Michigan apple crop to be “slightly smaller as a whole, like the whole country. It will be a good year.”
