Washington Grown Renewed Pt 1
I’m Bob Larson. The television series, Washington Grown, has been renewed for another season thanks to the support of the Washington Potato Commission and other ag groups.
The Commission’s executive director, Chris Voight says they’ll start planning out an eighth season of Washington agriculture stories this month …
VOIGT … “And we’re going to invite a bunch of ag commodity groups to come together and we’re going to sit in a conference room and we’re going to start hashing out, you know, what crops do we want to cover, what type of issues do we want to address within the crops, and then really kind of pick everybody’s brain of what stories we could tell and then who would be good folks to interview.”
Voight says the idea for Washington Grown cropped up about 10 years ago …
VOIGT … “It was kind of a long-range planning meeting. We brought all of the potato industry together in a hotel room in Spokane, Washington, and one of the things that came out of that strategy session was just the importance of telling the ag story to the public.”
It became important, Voight says when we felt like we were on the verge of consumers putting us out of business …
VOIGT … “Because they didn’t understand what it took to grow and produce food, and so we really wanted to make it an emphasis to tell that ag story. So much so, we decided to actually put potato promotions off to the side, and we’re the Potato Commission, but make that a secondary effort.
And, our first effort had to be to tell that story to the public about agriculture in general.”
Tune in tomorrow for more on Washington Grown.
