FRANKFORT, Mich. — Some Michigan fruit processors are having to import cherries from overseas in order to keep their businesses flowing. That’s because the tart cherry crop in Michigan and elsewhere was severely damaged this season.

Michigan got hit the hardest, with virtually all of the crop destroyed.

“The real problem was the March period,” said Ken Nye, horticulture and forestry specialist with the Michigan Farm Bureau. “If we could have had a more normal bloom period, we would have gotten through the late March to April period.”

But 15-20 frosts this spring were enough to kill most of the early blooms. Nye said Michigan grows about 75 percent of the country’s tart cherries, but other major growing states had damage to their cherry crop, too. Those include New York, Washington, Wisconsin and Utah.

Tim Brian, president of Smeltzer Orchard Co., said his business is importing cherries from Poland. The fruit is already processed and frozen, since fresh cherries are fragile and have to be processed quickly.

Smeltzer is a fruit processor but doesn’t own any orchards. It makes cherry products, such as chocolate-covered and dried tart cherries. It also dehydrates cherries for some of its smaller customers.

“The big players will source their own cherries,” Brian said. “What you want is to keep products on the shelf in order not to lose shelf space, because once you lose shelf space it’s hard to get it back. To me, I don’t look at it as undercutting the domestic product for this year. There’ve been other years where we’ve exported to Europe, so it goes back and forth.

“It’s very uncommon to have a complete wipeout like this. There wasn’t much carryover, either. The last two years, there’ve been moderate crops. We were really in need of a large crop, but unfortunately, Mother Nature didn’t cooperate.”

Nye said several big growers in Michigan are involved in processing and there are also cooperatives. He said imports of cherries won’t be a cure-all.

“Poland is a fairly major producer in Europe,” he said. “I understand that the Polish crop is not particularly large this year. There are already places where that crop will go. Turkey produces some cherries.

“To fill that void here is going to be pretty difficult. It’s probably not a viable alternative to fill the loss we’ve got this year.”

There was also talk that processors might substitute other fruit for the cherries to help make the cherries go a bit further. Nye tried to sound upbeat.

“There’s going to be some substitution,” he said. “The users are going to do whatever they can. There will be all kinds of alternatives. The market will figure out a way to ration supplies. The market will figure out a way to make fruit available. There are some blends of apples and cherry sauce, but there might not be quite as much of that around this year, either.”

That’s because the apple crop has also sustained significant damage this year.