Cherry Lan
Cherry Land
A p r i l 2 5 t h - 2 7 t h
T h e D a l l e s , O R
n o r t h w e s t c h e r r y f e s t i v a l . c o m
Welcome
The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce would like to welcome you to the 44th Annual Northwest Cherry Festival.
A long time favorite among locals and visitors alike, the festival is set in the spectacular Columbia River Gorge and showcases The Dalles deep agricultural heritage and Western roots. The Cherry Festival is three days of family-friendly activities and events.
The Northwest Cherry Festival takes place downtown The Dalles Friday, April 25th through Sunday, April 27th.
404 West 2nd St, The Dalles, Oregon 97058 (541) 296-2231 | www.thedalleschamber.com
Bing
Cascade Cherry Growers
PO Box 2668, The Dalles OR 97058 (541) 288-6753
Rainier
Budget Blinds of North Central Oregon
The Dalles, OR 97058 (541) 788-8444
Pacific Coast Producers
101 Madison Street, The Dalles OR 97058 (541)296-2547
Polehn Farms Inc.
2121 Dry Hollow Rd, The Dalles OR (541) 296-1735
Mahlum Architects Inc. 1380 SE 9th Ave , Portland OR 97214 (503) 244-4032
JQ General Contractors LLC
The Dalles OR (541) 340-9545
Marachino
Columbia Gorge Title 714 West 6th St, The Dalles OR 97058 (541) 386-3565
Last Stop Hotel & Saloon 209 E. 2nd St, The Dalles OR 97058 (541) 296-3070
Hanlon Development 101 W. 2nd St #2049, The Dalles OR 97058 (971) 350-8637
Mel Omeg Cherry Par ade Grand Marshall
By neita cecil
Mel Omeg, grand marshal for the 44th Annual Northwest Cherry Festival Parade in The Dalles on Saturday, April 26 at 10 a.m., has seen one transformation after another in his decades as a cherry grower.
His family has been farming in Wasco County since 1880. By the time he was born in 1943, his family had been in cherries for 23 years.
The Omegs gained more cherry orchards over time and today they have 90 acres, which are leased to Orchard View Farms. His son Mike Omeg is the director of operations for Orchard View.
From his earliest days, he can remember seeing the tipis pitched on the grounds of the orchards when Native Americans were hired to harvest cherries.
They were careful and thorough in their work. “The Native American women would not pick any bad cherries, they would only pick good ones,” he recounted.
Eventually, the workforce became largely poor
families fleeing the Dust Bowl, an extended drought in the farmlands of the Midwest in the 1930s.
“I remember that as a kid, poor families that arrived and had nothing,” Omeg said. “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck, a book about penniless Midwesterners fleeing the Dust Bowl, “Is a vivid story of the truth,” Omeg said. “I remember seeing that as a child, how poor families work.”
In those old days, it was non-irrigated dryland farming, cultivated during the spring. “It was very dusty during the summer,” he recalled.
The big change came in 1970. He was having trouble finding enough pickers, and, in a stroke of luck, two carloads of Mexicans arrived asking for work. They were kind, here legally, and he needed the help, Omeg said.
So he hired them, one of the first orchardists to do so. Through word of mouth and building connections, he grew a workforce of 300 Hispanic workers over the course of time.
Grand Marshall story cont.
He built trust and relationships, including visiting families in Mexico and California. “You treat people with honor and respect and fairness, and they will come through,” he said. “Those are the people that keep agriculture going.”
Cherries are a popular crop with fruit harvesters because it offers a better paycheck than crops like pears and apples, Omeg said.
Also in the 1970s, The Dalles Irrigation Project brought significant water to orchards, Omeg said, increasing the yield from one ton per acre of cherries to five tons per acre, even more in a good year.
Trees that used to be planted 40 feet apart are now planted 10-15 feet apart.
The profitable cherries are the fresh cherries. That switchover to exclusively fresh cherries happened about 10 years ago, he said.
And while Omeg loved being an innovator as an orchardist, he had an equal passion for the 12 years he spent being a sixth grade public school teacher at Dry Hollow Elementary and in Parkdale.
He knew school teaching was compatible with being an orchardist, but it reached a point where he had to pick just one.
“I had a very hard decision on whether I wanted to be a fruit grower or a sixth grade teacher, and I loved being a school teacher and I loved kids,” he reflected.
He’s still torn about his decision. “Some days I’d say I’d teach above all else. And other times, I’d say, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me. I love my farm.’”
But ultimately, he realized farming was the skill he wanted, that offered performance and growth, and he could do it the way he wanted.
Farming allowed him to be “very innovative in my farming practices and I loved it.
The kids were more important than the trees, but the profit was in the orchard business vs. teaching.”
Omeg served on many committees through Oregon
State University, and he worked with research plots testing new methods.
His constant drive was to produce a better cherry and be more profitable. That was driven out of need. “I had to grow in order to have a profit margin to meet my family’s needs,” he said.
Cost is more prohibitive today than 10-20 years ago. That narrowing profit margin caused him to increase his acreage to offset the marginal profit per acre.
He has stepped down from his committees, but he keeps up on things and still has a passion for soil and water conservation. His goal is simple: “to protect our land, our soil, for ourselves now and for future generations.”
He can nerd out about soil. “I like good soil and it involves a lot of components.” He said of his continual interest in what’s going on, he spoke like a true teacher: “You can’t afford to stop learning.”
King & Queen Bing
Lynn Long and his wife Marlene are this year’s King Bing and Queen Anne for the Northwest Cherry Festival in The Dalles, but Lynn is no stranger to being crowned cherry royalty.
In 2017, Long had the honor of being named Cherry King at a ceremony in Yakima by the Northwest Cherry Growers Association, that honors someone who has impacted the cherry industry.
It’s rare for a non-Washingtonian to get the honor, Long said, but Bob Bailey of Orchard View Farms in The Dalles received the honor the year before and was the one to crown him.
Long retired in 2017 from working as the Oregon State University extension agent focusing on cherries. His main area was
the Mid-Columbia but he worked elsewhere also.
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.
Lynn & Marlene Long
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 experts at universities, including Dr. Greg Lang at Washington State University, and John Morton at Oregon Cherry Growers, and other 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.
Lynn said, “We didn’t want growers to go out and spray just because they thought they might have the insect in their orchard. 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.”
She also did a study on packing houses, work-
ing with Dr. Eugene Kuperferman of Washington State University “In addition, we were also having a fruit set problem with a variety called Regina,” she said. She helped research, with Dr. Anita Azarenko, how to improve fruit set, or the process of turning a fertilized flower into a fruit, in low producing cherries.
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.”
Little Royals
Welcome Matylda & Freddy
“2024
Lil Royal Anne & Andy”
Events
FRIDAY - SUNDAY
CASCADE SQUARE MERCHANTS WINDOW
CONTEST
VOTING: Wednesday • April 23rd thru Saturday • April 26th
WINNER IS ANNOUNCED Sunday, April 27th
Various Locations throughout The Dalles WE NEED YOUR VOTES
NW NATURAL CHERRY LAND ~ CHERRY TRAIL
Thursday • April 24th thru Sunday • April 27th
Prizes to be WON and specials to enjoy!!!!
Various Locations throughout The Dalles
RAINIER AMUSEMENTS CARNIVAL
Friday • April 25th thru Sunday • April 27th
First Street, The Dalles
LITTLE MUSIC CITY
Friday • April 25th thru Sunday • April 27th
Live Music at Various Locations in The Dalles
Check TDCommunityCalendar.com for Live Music Around The Dalles
ADVENTIST HEALTH COLUMBIA GORGE OPEN-AIR
MARKET
Artists • Crafter • Food Vendors • More
Friday • April 25th • 4:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Saturday • April 26th • 11:00 am – 9:00 pm
Sunday • April 27th • 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Between 1st & 2nd Street, Court to Laughlin Streets
FRIDAY
ROUTE 30 BURGERS & BREWS & GOOGLE
~ ENTERTAINMENT STAGE
Entertainment Stage • Dining Area • Family
Friendly Beer Garden
Second & Federal Street
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM / IT & I
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM / Lucky Beaucoup
8:00 PM – 10:00 PM / Wes Youssi & The
County Champs
SATURDAY
DANCING HORSES sponsored by
Polehn Farms Inc. & JJ Castro
Construction LLC
Second Street & Laughlin Grand Stand
Saturday • April 26th • 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
B
RIVERMARK COMMUNITY CREDIT UNION
CHERRY FESTIVAL ROYALTY CORONATION
& MID COLUMBIA SENIOR CENTER
COMMUNITY BREAKFAST
Saturday • April 26th
8:00am • Breakfast
8:30 am • Coronation
Mid-Columbia Senior Center • 9th & Cherry
Heights
CGCC FUN RUN
Saturday • April 26th • 8:00 am
Dry Hollow Rd off East 19th Running Course
RIVER CITY ABATE ANNUAL TEDDY BEAR
RUN & POKER RUN
Saturday • April 26th • 9:00 am
Start at coastal farm & ranch parking lot
BISHOP SANITATION
UNDERRINER CHERRY FESTIVAL PARADE
Saturday • April 26th • 10:00 am
Starts at Sixth & Webber and travels the normal parade route through town
CHERRY FESTIVAL QUILT SHOW
Saturday • April 26th • 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
St. Peter’s Landmark & Herbring House Courtyard
405 Lincoln Street • 314 West 3rd Street
KODL CLASSIC CAR SHOW
Saturday • April 26th • 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
Awards at 3:00 pm
Federal Street between 2nd St & 4th St
SANDOZ FARM CUSTOMER APPRECIATION DAY
Saturday • April 26th • 11:00 am - 4:00 pm
5755 Mill Creek Road, The Dalles
UNDERRINER COMMUNITY FAIR
Saturday • April 26th • 11:00 am - 4:00 pm
Parking lot at 2nd & Washington Street
ROUTE 30 BURGERS & BREWS & UNDERRINER
FORD OF THE DALLES ~ ENTERTAINMENT STAGE
Entertainment Stage • Dining Area • Family Friendly Beer Garden
Second & Federal Street
• 11:00AM - Hot Dog Eating Contest!
• 11:30AM -Cherry Pie Eating Contest!
• 12:00PM – 2:00 PM / James Howard
• 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM / Thee Honeybuds
• 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM / Got your six
• 7:00PM - Belly Dancers’ Performance!
• 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM / Tombstone Shadows CCR Tribute Band
SUNDAY
ROUTE 30 BURGERS & BREWS & UMPQUA BANK ~ ENTERTAINMENT STAGE
Entertainment Stage • Dining Area • Family Friendly Beer Garden
Second & Federal Street
Entertainment Details • Live Music • Brought to you by Tokin Subaru & Route 30
• 12:00 PM – 3:00 PM / River City Rhythm
• 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM / Walk Through Fire
• 4:00 PM – ANNOUNCE the Winners of the Window Decorating Contest
