Traverse City, Michigan calls itself the Cherry Capital of the World. So why does Washington win the cherry quiz? Because America has TWO cherry kingdoms.
Cherries come in two main kinds: sweet cherries for eating fresh, and tart (sour) cherries for pies and juice. USDA counts them separately.
Basis: USDA statistics track sweet and tart cherries as separate crops (see the quiz's source).
Washington leads in sweet cherries โ they ripen well in its dry, sunny valleys where rain-caused fruit-splitting is rarer.
Basis: USDA data (this site's quiz) and standard fruit-growing geography.
Michigan leads in tart pie cherries, grown along Lake Michigan. The big lake works like a giant temperature blanket: it keeps blossoms from waking too early in spring and shields them from frost.
Basis: The Lake Michigan fruit belt and its lake-effect climate are textbook geography.
Why did each state stick to its own cherry? Tradition and equipment probably feed the split โ pie-cherry farms have shakers and processing plants nearby, sweet-cherry farms have packing houses for fresh fruit. Reasonable, but hard to prove one cause.
โป A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
๐ Sources for the rankings mentioned in this note (links to the original data and retrieval dates) are on each quiz page below.