Crop Estimation Part 3

Crop Estimation Part 3. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Craig Hornblow is a consultant with AgFirst Consultants which aims to provide rural and agribusiness clients with access to experienced consultants who offer sound and unbiased advice. He talked recently with tree fruit growers about crop estimation.

HORNBLOW: So you’ve got to look at this and say if we want this information and use it, if the warehouse picks these two blocks up we tell them they’re both peaking on hundreds and their both 97 count average, what they’re going to extract from those blocks and where they can put the value and how they manage their business is totally different because an 8% variation in those value counts in terms of what we’re doing. So the information that we can – if we can find and get this in the orchard prior to harvest we can manage our way through this a little bit better.

He talks about consistency much like a candy company puts out candy bars…one is the same as another as is another.

HORNBLOW: The other thing I just want to touch on that we need to think about is variation for our consumer. So we need to think about we are doing size, we are doing color but we always talk about brix and pressures as averages. The same thing happens with brix and pressures as it does with size. We get this variation. We don’t get normal distributions, we get skews. Averages are not all the same, If you want a consumer to have that Cliff Bar experience or the Mars Bar experience we have to tighten this up.

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