Edgars Rubauskis, senior researcher at the Dobele Institute of Horticulture, assesses the quality and yield of this year's apples in a 12-hectare field of more than 1,500 apple varieties as good.
"A good harvest, because in most of Latvia there were no colds and frosts. The worst, of course, is in the eastern part of Latvia, where there was a cold snap in the spring just before flowering," Rubauskis said.
Although the harvest is good, Latvian apple growers complain about fierce competition with foreign produce.
"Second- or third-class apples, you could say, are coming into Latvia from Poland. What they cannot sell to the west, to the south of them, they sell at a cheap price. Unfortunately, this is often a disposal price, plus transport costs, so the Latvian buyer goes – oh, yes, the Pole grows so cheaply... The Pole just took it to the trash," says Jānis Zilvers, Deputy Chairman of the Board of the Latvian Fruit Growers' Association.
Now, at the time of the apple harvest, the price of apples is low. Often, on the side of the road, you can see apples in boxes to be taken for free, or on websites for a few cents a kilo.
Meanwhile, varietal apple growers sell good quality dessert apples for between one and two euros per kilo.
The problem is that imported apples are often falsely represented in shops as being grown in Latvia.
"Non-Latvian apples are also sold under the name of Latvian apples. It would be normal for unprocessed products grown in Latvia to be traceable back to the grower, back to the farm. So each package would be labelled with the specific farm," Zilvers said.
The Latvian Fruit Growers' Association points out that Latvia has so many apple-growing areas that, if properly tended everywhere, it would be possible to offer many different flavors of apples to domestic buyers throughout the year. The Dobele Institute of Horticulture continues to work on finding new varieties of hardy apples with even better flavors.
"At the moment, quite a number of hybrids developed by breeder Laila Ikase are still being tested. Their main characteristics are mostly high quality, as well as disease resistance - one of our main breeding goals," says Gunārs Lācis, Head of the Genetics and Breeding Department at the Dobele Institute of Horticulture.
Statistics compiled several years ago showed that each person in Latvia eats an average of 14 kilograms of apples a year.
