Yakima, Wash. -- It's a sight farmers and industry leaders haven't seen before: tons of cherries ready for harvest at the same time across much of Central Washington.

A mild spring and sweltering temperatures earlier this month and in June have led to a record crop more than twice the size of last year's. It's coming off trees early and swamping processing plants.

"What we've seen in the last couple of days is that there is so much fruit in the orchards that our warehouses just aren't keeping up," Washington State Fruit Commission President B.J. Thurlby said Friday. "I haven't talked to anyone in the industry who has seen it like this before."

Overtime and an increased workforce are the order at bottlenecked processing plants, and some growers will be forced to leave cherries on the trees, Thurlby said. There also have been reports of shortages in packaging materials.

"It's coming in pretty big, that's for sure," he said. "Last year and previous years, it took 40 days to ship 8 million boxes (of cherries). We did that this year in 20 days."

This year, roughly 20 million boxes are expected to come from the state, eclipsing the previous record of 14.9 million boxes two years ago, Thurlby said.

The number of workers at processing plants in the Yakima Valley has already increased from roughly 600 last year to more than 1,000 this year, said Keith Mathews, executive director of the Yakima Valley Growers-Shippers Association.

"Part of the economic message -- what it means to the city of Yakima -- is virtually anyone who is willing to package cherries at a reasonable wage can find a job," he said.

Miles Kohl, CEO of Allan Brothers Fruit in Naches, said he believes "the industry in general knew this was coming. But until you actually go through harvest, I think it did catch the industry by surprise."

The Washington cherry crop is typically harvested first in the southern part of the state and in lower elevations before moving north. This year, cherries are being picked in both Wapato and Omak at the same time, Thurlby said.

" ... We've never seen that before," he said. "The whole state, on the Bing crop, has bloomed at the same time."

High temperatures over the July 4 weekend has led to an early harvest from the Brewster area clear to the Canadian border, Mathews said.

"Typically, they come off around Aug. 10 and later," he said. "Some of those are two, three weeks earlier than normal."

The overabundance of cherries means processors are not packaging smaller cherries, which were marketable last year, Mathews said.

And some packaging supplies have run short, he said.

"Those packing late (in the season) run a bigger risk of running out of packing materials," he said.

Plastic bags shipped from oversees have run short here because they are ordered in January, before any indication of crop sizes, said supplier salesman Aaron Van Wyk with HR Spinner Corp. in Yakima.

"People are scrambling all over trying to get as many as they can," he said. "They're short, but I don't think it's critical. There are other packaging options -- clam shells, boxes."

Currently, growers are getting an average price of $20 per box of cherries. The anticipated 20 million boxes from the state this year should equate to about 400 million pounds of cherries worth about $400 million, Mathews said.

Last year the state's entire crop was worth about half that.

With a shelf life of only about a week, there are a lot of cherries to dump on the market at one time, Mathews said.

"I think retailers are on fairly aggressive advertising plans to try and quickly move the volume of cherries they're receiving," he said.

* Phil Ferolito can be reached at 509-577-7749 or pferolito@yakimaherald.com.