Data That Protects, Defends And Markets The Tree Fruit Industry

Data That Protects, Defends And Markets The Tree Fruit Industry

Susan Allen
Susan Allen
I'm Susan Allen with The Fruit Grower Report I had a chance to talk with Chris Mertz Regional director for Alaska, Idaho ,Oregon and Washington's USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service.

I asked him about his job responsibilities.

MERTZ: Well for the state of Washington I am still kind of the contact with other government agencies or with commodity organizations so I attend a lot of the annual meetings that I am probably going to see you now.

You also mentioned that you worked on special cases

MERTZ: I am the one that deals with tough data requests or answering the public. A lot of times I call big operations or operations that are not cooperating on our surveys and I try to convince them on what we are doing.

And why they should fill their survey out?

MERTZ: Yea, so it's making sure we get the information out for people to use. So we have a good relationship with the state department of agricultures. They use a lot of data for marketing, promoting and defending agriculture and a lot of that data comes from us. So the information that they use comes from our surveys that we publish but it really comes from the farmers since we collect a lot of it from farmers. Actually we are just wrapping up a project in Oregon. In Oregon we climb up hazelnut trees

And counts the nuts...... when that data going to be available?

GERTZ: It's going to be published on the 23rd of August,

The day this program airs. Thank you to Chris and his team throughout the Northwest and Alaska for the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, collecting the data that helps defend , promote and market our agriculture.

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