The Cherry Festival Hits 100 in Six Weeks. The Crop Just Crashed 67%. The Orchards Aren’t Staying Orchards.
The 100th National Cherry Festival opens July 4 in downtown Traverse City. A few hundred thousand people are going to eat pie, watch the Blue Angels, spit pits at each other, and wave at a parade dedicated to a fruit that, last year, Northwest Michigan barely produced.
That isn’t dramatic. In 2024, the four-county northwest region — the cherry capital — put up 101 million pounds of tart cherries. In 2025, it put up 34 million. A 67% collapse, courtesy of a late-spring frost that wiped out the bloom across Leelanau and Grand Traverse counties.
The 2026 outlook isn’t much better. Processors are already telling growers they’ll match last year’s emergency prices because there isn’t going to be a real crop anywhere in the U.S. this season either.
Drive M-22 from Suttons Bay up to Northport this week and you can see the second half of the story. The orchards along that stretch are quietly being pulled. The trees that come out aren’t being replaced. And the land — flat, sandy, gently sloping toward the water — is becoming something else.
What 67% Actually Looks Like on the Ground
A bad cherry year used to mean a tough season for one grower. A 67% regional drop is a structural event.
Tart cherry trees don’t shrug off a 28-degree night in May. The flowers kill, the fruit doesn’t set, and a farm that needed maybe 8 cents of margin per pound to break even is suddenly running at a loss. Layer on years of compressed processor prices — 49 cents a pound in 2021, 22 cents by 2023 — plus a labor market that’s two H-2A workers short on a good day, and you get growers doing math on their phones at the kitchen table.
The math doesn’t work. Industry officials are careful with their language and will tell you total acreage isn’t collapsing statewide. That’s technically true. But out here in the northwest, where the bulk of the tart crop lives, the trees are coming down farm by farm. Some growers replant with grapes. Some try hardier sweet cherry varieties. A growing number are calling agents like us and asking what their orchard parcel is worth as something other than an orchard.
The Land Underneath Was Always the Better Asset
This is the part nobody at the festival particularly wants to think about. The reason these orchards exist along the bays in the first place — the gentle slopes, the lake-modulated air that delays the killing frost a few critical weeks, the sandy loam that drains — is the exact same reason the parcels are extraordinary residential land.
A 40-acre cherry orchard outside Suttons Bay with West Bay views and a 12-degree southern slope was, until recently, valued for what it grew. It’s now valued for what it could become. The gap between those two numbers is the whole story.
Some of that land is moving as estate-scale single-family parcels — the buyer who wants their own private slice of the peninsula with a vineyard, a barn, and a pickleball court. Some of it is going to small cluster developments, the kind that need a township planning commission to bless them. Suttons Bay Township had a project literally called “Cherry Beach Orchards — Open Space Residential Land Development” wind through its planning office this spring before the applicant withdrew it. There will be more.
What Buyers Need to Know Before Touring an “Orchard Parcel”
If you’re shopping land up here right now and the listing mentions “established orchard,” “working cherry farm,” or “agricultural use,” the parcel is doing one of three things. Knowing which one matters more than the listing photos.
It’s actively being farmed. The trees are healthy, fruit is still being harvested, and the parcel may be locked into a P.A. 116 farmland preservation agreement for another decade or more. Beautiful, romantic, very hard to develop. Read the deed before you fall in love.
It’s transitioning. The current owner pulled trees in the last 18 months, the rows are still visible from the air but gone on the ground, and the land is now sitting between an ag classification and a residential one. The township still calls it ag for tax purposes. The buyer pool is mostly residential. The owner is fishing.
It’s already sold and being subdivided. Watch the planning commission agendas in Leelanau, Bingham, Suttons Bay, Peninsula, and Acme townships. Site plans for “open space” or “rural residential” cluster developments on former orchard parcels are showing up a lot more often than they did two years ago.
Each of those buckets gets priced and negotiated differently. We see buyers from downstate routinely overpay for the first one because they fell in love with the cherry trees in October and didn’t read the P.A. 116 paperwork until closing week.
The Old Mission Wrinkle
This is where the 30-year-old voter rule on Old Mission Peninsula — covered yesterday — starts to overlap with the cherry collapse.
Old Mission has more zoning protection than basically anywhere in the region. The peninsula long ago throttled how much land can subdivide, which is why the median home there sits at $890K against a county median of $420K. Leelanau and Antrim don’t have that same wall.
Which means as orchard land gets reclassified, you’re going to see meaningfully more new homes show up off M-22, M-204, and US-31 over the next few years than you will on the Old Mission side of the bay. That’s not a value judgment. It’s just where the new supply is going to land.
Why This Isn’t All Bad
The better news: what’s replacing the orchards is mostly not strip malls. Townships up here are actively writing open-space residential zoning that requires cluster development with preserved frontage and view corridors. It’s not perfect. It’s a lot better than the alternative.
The other better news, if you’re a buyer who’s been priced out of finished waterfront: orchard parcels with the right soils, the right exposure, and the right utility access are about to give you a way in that didn’t really exist two years ago. Building from raw land is harder than buying a finished house, but the gap between a $1.2M lake home and a 10-acre orchard parcel with a Bay view in the mid-$400s is real. It’s a gap our buyers are looking at more seriously every week. If you’re curious what’s actually on the market right now, our current listings and the broader inventory in the region are worth a look.
The Pit-Spitting Contest Will Survive
The festival will be fine. The hundredth one is going to be massive — The Fray, Lauren Alaina, a parade route that hasn’t really changed since the 1950s, fireworks over West Bay.
The cherry industry will adapt or it won’t, and the orchards either way are going to keep coming down at a faster clip than most people driving through Suttons Bay on a July afternoon realize. If you’re thinking about buying agricultural or “former agricultural” land up here, this is the year to actually understand the difference between those two things before you make an offer.
If you’re sitting on inherited orchard ground and trying to figure out what it’s worth now versus what it was worth five years ago, the honest answer is “probably very different, and it depends entirely on what’s underneath.” Janel has been through enough of these structural shifts in 25 years of working this market to tell you that’s not a question you want to answer with a Zillow estimate.
Happy 100th to the festival. The land is the bigger story.
Taylor Brown, Realtor
(231) 360-1510
