ReTain Helps Labor Issues

ReTain Helps Labor Issues. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

How can a product that was designed to help slow down fruit maturation to give it more color be used to help with labor issues? Bruce Grimm, executive director of the Washington State Horticultural Association has used Valent’s ReTain for many years.

GRIMM: Harvest timing has always been an issue even when we had a good labor supply. Their material ReTain is material that inhibits ethylene so its use is good because it will delay the onset of maturity while apples are gaining color. So we used to use it as an aid to getting better color on our poorer coloring strains of Red Delicious; the old Oregon’s, Oregon Spur II’s those kinds of things. It does have the advantage that it can stretch out your harvest window.

Grimm says it really has become less about coloring and now more about orchard harvest management.

GRIMM: Same thing on Gala’s. We use it still on Gala’s to manage harvest flow. Now when you factor back in the uncertainties of a labor force or the fact that your labor force maybe smaller than you would like to have, that has been the issue over the last couple of years. So the ability to stretch out a harvest and maintain maturity and still get that fruit off in a timely fashion, that’s where the real value of a material like ReTain comes in.

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