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How was cherry season this year? For many farmers on the Old Mission Peninsula, including my brothers, Dean Johnson and Ward Johnson, it was good. They received a great price for tart cherries – $1/pound – and despite a few storms, the crop was mostly good quality.
Much of the cherry crop downstate was wiped out due to frost and cold weather. While we never want to wish bad luck on ANY farmer, that situation created a better market for cherries here in northern Michigan.
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Johnson Farms continues using a drone sprayer to deliver fungicides and other chemicals to the orchards. While they still use traditional sprayers pulled by a tractor (check out this vintage photo of my dad and Uncle Guy), they added a drone into the mix last year, and now other OMP farmers are using drones, too. (Click here to read about integrated pest management used on the farm.)
The company, Airway Ag, was started by our former UPS Guy on the Old Mission Peninsula, Kent Ackerman, and his brother. Here’s a photo of Kent filling up the tank at the Johnson Farms cooling pad on Center Road.
Some of the benefits of using a drone includes better precision (including the hard-to-reach tops of trees) which means less waste, the ability to reach hard-to-access terrain, lower labor and fuel costs, and custom plans for each farmer.
The drone will actually sense if there are no trees in a certain spot and stop spraying. Read more here, and check out this video of Kent spraying an orchard on Ward’s farm.
The cooling pad process has remained largely unchanged over the years. The grading of the cherries takes place at the cooling pad, and the amount paid by the processors depends on the quality of the cherries. Things like brown rot, size and cracks figure into the quality and price.
And my dad’s ingenious irrigation system – he set it up to pipe run-off water from the cooling pad back to an orchard — is still in place some 30 years later. Click here to see how the cooling pad works, and here to see how a cherry shaker works. Here’s a few minutes of life at the Johnson Farms cooling pad…
The orchard crews continue to use both the one-man shakers and the newer side-by-side shakers. The equipment has come a long way since the early days of Shipley limb shakers (built at Arnold White’s shop where Seven Hills is currently located). It took FOREVER to get through an orchard with those — though not as long as when migrant workers showed up by the hundreds to pick cherries. Those were the days.
One thing that WAS different this year was the air quality. While the cherries were mostly great (sweets took a bit of a hit on brown rot due to rains right before harvest), the air quality was not. On many days, the crew wore masks because of the smokey haze caused by the Canadian wildfires.
Here are a few photos of the 2026 Cherry Season. Peterson Farms in Shelby and Great Lakes Packing in Kewadin continue to take cherries from Johnson Farms. Apples — coming right up! — will also go to Peterson Farms.
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