12/30/08 Looking Back

Looking Back. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. It is that time of year where we take a few moments and have a look back at the year. The fruit industry like all of agriculture spend a good deal of the time waiting for the 2007 Farm Bill to be completed. When it finally arrived the specialty crop industry was excited about being included for the first time. Unfortunately there was no such luck with immigration reform. Dan Fazio with Washington Farm Bureau spent a lot of time trying to make the H2A Guestworker program fit into the round hole. FAZIO: You know the H2A program is bureaucratic, it's costly, it's unreliable and we've documented that of all the industry guest worker programs the agriculture guest worker program is by far the worst and the administration is trying to remedy that. The growing season was put on hold as a long cold spring pushed tree fruit and vine production back by several weeks. Gip Redman with the Oregon Cherry Growers commented on an early frost. REDMAN: Mother Nature is just too big and there's certainly areas that don't get frosted very much. The big mystery of the year was what happened to the honeybee. Sue Olson, a Yakima beekeeper was one of a number of people trying to find answers. OLSON: There's a lot of bees dying and nobody can really put their finger on it to know what's causing it. They've identified several different things but as far as taking them to a doctor and saying what's wrong, they don't know for sure. More tomorrow. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.