Opinion: Growers Need A Means To Spread The News
June 4, 2013 
From time to time you hear people who work in agriculture upbraiding colleagues for not getting out there and talking about food and fiber production. I know, I have done it myself.
But that’s because it’s more important than ever due to the
fact that the disconnect between farm and fork has never been greater. Growers have become so skillful and modern technology so useful that it takes less than 2% of our population to feed 100%. (At least theoretically, assuming an ultra-efficient distribution system.)
In addition, the message is powerful. After all, everybody eats. Fruit growers have a particularly powerful message because you provide food that’s credited with everything from lowering the risk of heart attacks to helping to ward off Alzheimer’s Disease.
Being in a position where I get a lot of press releases and such, I constantly hear the drumbeat. One arrived just the other day. Here’s the first paragraph:
“The era of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ in agriculture is over,” remarked Dallas Hockman to attendees at the Animal Agriculture Alliance’s 12th annual Stakeholders Summit. Hockman, vice president of industry relations for the National Pork Producers Council, adamantly told Summit attendees that we [the industry] can no longer afford to stay quiet; we must communicate.
It’s a valid message, no question. But now I’m starting to think that it is the means to deliver the message, not the willingness, that is the chief obstacle to the popular awareness of the importance of agriculture to our society. I say that because I delved into some crops that were new to me recently — citrus crops — and I was almost taken aback by the willingness of those in the industry to share.
Citrus Ambassadors
My colleagues and I recently prepared a special California Citrus Report, and it was the first time in many, many years that American/Western Fruit Grower had covered citrus crops.
For too many years it was thought that citrus growers were a unique breed, that they didn’t have much in common with growers of grapes, nuts, pome, and stone fruits. Perhaps that was true years ago, but now most issues, like water and regulatory problems, are shared by growers of all fruit crops.
I knew very little about citrus when I started talking to those in the industry. I was honest about that fact, and perhaps because of it, all I talked to, save one company, were incredibly generous with information. That one company that was the exception shall go nameless here in part because I’ve talked to its employees for other stories I have written, and they were willing to share.
Just as an aside, I’ve had it go the other way too, when people were a little too willing to share. Years ago when I first started out, a grower told me of one of his practices that I dutifully wrote down. It was a darn good thing there was a crop adviser listening in, because he quickly told me that what the grower was talking about wasn’t exactly above board, and the grower might get in trouble if I wrote about it.
Anyway, I wish more people could talk to the gracious folks who make up the California citrus industry, from the growers, marketers, and researchers to the helpful staff of California Citrus Mutual. Then those enlightened people would in turn be spreading the good news about agriculture in general, and fruit growing in particular.
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