Apple sales rebounded in 2013

Thursday, February 6, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

Ontario apple sales rebounded last year to their 2011 level after frost decimated the crop in 2012, Statistics Canada reports.

“It’s good to see the apple sales number was back up for Ontario in 2013 because they had the catastrophic loss in 2012” and it’s great they’ve recovered from that, says Ontario Federation of Agriculture president Mark Wales. The good yield in Ontario last year probably helped to offset the lack of apples in storage for the 2012/13 winter from the 2012 crop.

Wales says for the most part 2013 was “a pretty good fruit year in Ontario.”

The Ontario apple sales information was included in a recently released Statistics Canada report on fruit and vegetable sales for 2013. Canadian fruit and vegetable farmers sold $1.7 billion worth of produce last year, which is down 1.4 per cent from a year earlier.

Wales says the small sales number decrease is weather related. In Ontario there were heavy rains in the middle of the growing season during late June and early July that hit the main processing tomato and sugar beet growing areas.

Across Canada, fruit sales were down, while vegetable sales increased. Fruit growers reported a 6.2 per cent sales decrease in 2013 to $825 million while sales for vegetable farmers rose 3.5 per cent to $868 million, Statistics Canada says.

Vegetable sales increased in a number of provinces, including British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador. Nationally, carrots at $93.2 million were the top contributor to the vegetable sales figure, followed by sweet corn, $72 million, cabbage, $66.7 million, and tomatoes, $65 million.

The fact that Ontario wasn’t mentioned among the provinces with vegetable sales increases “reflects the kind of growing season we had last summer. We had a lot of rain,” says Wales, who grows vegetables and fruits, such as peppers, garlic, sweet corn, tomatoes, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, onions, eggplant, and beans, on his Elgin-area farm along with herbs.

Wales says his vegetable crops took a hit from the more than 30 inches of rain his area received last summer.

On the fruit side, apple sales increased by 2.7 per cent nationally to $191.3 million, while grape sales were up 3.5 per cent to $149.6 million. Generally the growth in fruit sales was the result of increased production, Statistics Canada says.

Fruits with declining sales included blueberries, down 22.3 per cent to $188 million, and cranberries, down 13.5 per cent to $94 million. BF