Heavy rainfall on Saturday has caused widespread damage to cherry orchards in Chile’s Metropolitan and Maule regions, resulting in an estimated 15 per cent loss to this season’s crop, according to producer association Fedefruta.

Losses to orchards in the Santiago area, which suffered 4-11mm of rain, were the lightest since most of the fruit in the area had already been harvested. Nevertheless, Cristián Allendes Marín of Calera de Tango said between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the remaining fruit was lost.

Further south, where the harvest is in full swing, the damage has been more severe. Around 12-30mm of rain fell in some areas in the O’Higgins region, where an estimated 20 per cent of the fruit has been too badly damaged to export, said Fedefruta’s Claudio Vergara Tagle.

In Maule, meanwhile, where the rainfall was heaviest, one local producer put the damage estimate at 25-40 per cent of the crop.

“We won’t get a true picture of the losses until three days after the rains,” said Antonio Walker Prieto. “What we can say with certainty is that losses are significant and blow the earlier export forecast of 20m cartons out of the water.”

Source - http://www.fruitnet.com/