Tree Fruit Trends Part 4

Tree Fruit Trends Part 4. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

We have spent the last week looking at a new survey recently released by Northwest Farm Credit Services on the tree fruit industry. Jeff Fagg presented the results at the annual Hort convention and one of the topics dealt with investments.

FAGG: We talked about the best way to invest profits or earnings. The categories we had on the survey were; pay down debt, increase working capital, orchard or farm expansion and non-orchard fruit investments. And the interesting thing to pull out is again certainly the large players are directing more profits to expansion. I do think it’s a healthy sign for the industry that both large and small growers are doing something that is dear to every bankers heart and that’s to try to increase their working capital position. And then there’s certainly some debt pay down going on there.

The report is available to tree fruit growers and is also being used by Farm Credit. One final note from the report deals with opportunities and threats.

FAGG: Opportunities; better promotion of tree fruit health benefits, exports, new varieties, improved orchard efficiencies via technology and planning. And the threats again were very, very common among the two groups with labor being a large leader in that area, government regulation, over production, increasing production costs were also concerns.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.