Oregon’s official state fruit had a bad year.

Pear growers in the Hood River Valley are still taking stock of their financial losses following a challenging 2025 season.

Growers estimate they’re looking at $40 to $45 million in losses. With one pear variety, they couldn’t make enough money because the markets were flooded, pushing down prices. Pests damaged other varieties, making those pears impossible to sell.

Now, growers are hoping the federal government will step in to bring much-needed aid, but they’re not counting on it.

The 2025 harvest season began with Bartlett pears. Growers already had a glut of pears that summer, said Lesley Tamura, a pear grower and chair of the Columbia Gorge Fruit Growers. That, coupled with the closure of the Del Monte pear cannery in Yakima, Washington, last May, exacerbated the problem.

“That meant that all these Bartlett pears that would normally go for cannery didn’t have a home anymore, so they were pushed onto the fresh market,” Tamura said. “And that really did a lot of damage, just flooding the market even more so than having a large crop.”

On top of that, D’Anjou pears were hit with a bad infestation of pear psylla. That insect feeds on pear trees and leaves behind a sticky goo on leaves and on the pears.

“That goo eventually develops into a black sooty mold that marks the pears and it makes them unmarketable,” Tamura said. “And so we were seeing it all through the valley all throughout the season, all summer and right up to harvest.”

The pear psylla pest is an annual problem in the Pacific Northwest, but it was worse last year, and growers don’t exactly know what caused it yet, Tamura said.

Oregon’s pear industry produced 199,800 tons of crop in 2024, with production worth roughly $120 million. In 2025, that number went up to 271,720 tons, a 36% increase, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. But the economics of agriculture means growing more fruit does not necessarily lead to making more money — at times, the opposite can happen.

Tamura said growers will be lucky if they get half what they usually bring in a normal year. They are still receiving checks from last year’s harvest, which they usually get from January through November.

Now, growers are seeking an emergency declaration from Hood River County Commissioners. The local declaration itself doesn’t do much, Tamura said, but they’re hoping they could use it as leverage to ask the USDA to declare an emergency, which would release financial aid in the form of low-interest rate loans.

The county is still deciding whether the pest and the financial losses pear growers face justify a local emergency declaration, said Katie Skakel, the emergency and resilience program manager for Hood River County.

The USDA has already released some of the $12 billion the Trump administration previously earmarked for farmers hit with economic challenges caused by low crop prices and the administration’s international trade disputes.

But only $1 billion of that bucket of money is set aside for fruits and vegetables. And the federal government has not yet opened the application window or released a timeline or guidance on how or when growers will receive any financial aid.

“We are basically having to turn to lines of credit or leveraging our personal assets to try to keep us going until we may get some more money later this year,” Tamura said.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/11/hood-river-valley-pear-oregon-agriculture-crop/