Northwest Cherry Festival: Meet this year’s King Bing and Queen Anne

It’s rare for a non-Washingtonian to get tapped, Long said, but Bob Bailey of Orchard View Farms in The Dalles received the honor the year before and crowned him.

Long retired in 2017 from working as the Oregon State University (OSU) extension agent focusing on cherries. His main area was the Mid-Columbia, but he also worked elsewhere.

Long had an ambitious goal: “To make The Dalles the best cherry industry in the world.”

To that end, he visited other countries, studying their methods and bringing them back here to great success.

When Long became the extension agent in 1988, The Dalles was mostly a processing cherry industry. That meant growing Royal Anne for producing maraschino cherries and other processing products. Some fresh cherries, Bings, were also grown.

The trees were grown on full-size rootstock, with a certain method of growing the tree that is “old fashioned and with serious limitations to it,” Long said.

The local cherry industry sent Long to Europe in 1994, “and what I discovered there was quite revolutionary in what they were doing, and we were not doing here.”

It included using smaller trees that can be picked from the ground and using pest management systems that required fewer and softer chemicals.

They also grew more varieties, which had several benefits. It extended harvest, protecting crops from rain damage, and it allowed better workforce management since not everything was becoming ripe at once, Long said.

OSU had been researching these things, but these new technologies had never been implemented commercially. After local growers went to Europe themselves the next year, they came back and began trials of the new techniques.

“The whole process started in 1995, and it pretty much revolutionized the cherry industry, starting in Oregon and moving to Washington state and to other parts of the United States,” Long said.

He credited innovative local orchardists like Tim Dahle, Mel Omeg, John Carter, Steve Rempel, and Greg Johnson, who were willing to try new things and take risks. He also worked with other experts, including Dr. Greg Lang at Washington State University,  John Morton at Oregon Cherry Growers, and fieldmen in the area.

“It was a united effort to move the cherry industry in a different direction,” he said.

Long and his wife, Marlene, met when they were both at graduate school at Washington State University, earning master’s degrees in plant pathology.

Marlene did research projects, acting as the boots on the ground for a number of researchers. She helped with research on cherry fruit fly, the most important insect pest of cherries.

She also did research on obliquebanded leafroller, an insect that attacks fruit, trapping the insect from orchards and gathering rolled leaves and storing them in her fridge at home.

The key information from her studies was letting growers know if and when to spray for the leafrollers.

“We didn’t want growers to go out and spray just because they thought they might have the insect in their orchard,” Long said. “We wanted them to scout their orchard, find out what the population was and find out if it had reached the threshold where it threatens the crop. What Marlene did was learn what that threshold was.”

Further, she did a study on packing houses, working with Dr. Eugene Kuperferman of Washington State University. With Dr. Anita Azarenko of OSU, they discovered how to improve fruit set, or the process of turning a fertilized flower into a fruit, in a low producing cherry variety called Regina.

Then, she worked for 15 years at Oregon Cherry Growers in research and development with Dr. Carl Payne, with a focus on processing cherries.

Asked if he thought as a kid that he’d grow up to be a cherry wiz, Long laughed and said, “not for a second. I’ve been very fortunate to have this job and to work with the people and the growers. It’s been a huge blessing that God has given me and my family over the years.”