2010 Fruit Year in Review

2010 Fruit Year in Review

Fruit Year in Review. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

The fruit industry continued to grow and look to the future in 2010 and the industry has benefitted greatly from research being done at Washington State University and Dan Bernardo, Dean of WSU’s College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences says that will continue.

BERNARDO: I’m a pretty frank speaker and I’ve said this even outside of the tree fruit community that the tree fruit industry has received and continues to receive more financial support from WSU, new financial support than any other industry in Washington agriculture. We believe that it’s important to make that investment for a variety of reasons but the most important one is that there is an incredible need and many of the solutions to these issues are really around research and education.

The Mexico tariff issue on some northwest fruits continued and Mike Willett with the NW Hort Council discussed the issue with fruit growers.

WILLETT: There was sort of a back and forth with the White House saying Congress needed to something but the coalition that NW Hort Council belongs to that’s working on this issue is telling us that strictly the resolution is now a political decision and really needs to be resolved at the White House level and we don’t see any significant movement at this point in time to resolve this trucking problem. So we’re still stuck.

Of course to date there still has been no resolution to the tariff issue. More tomorrow.

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

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