Weathering COVID Pt 1
With today’s Fruit Grower Report, I’m Bob Larson. How have farmers, and tree fruit farmers specifically, managed the past couple of years hit hard by the challenges brought by the pandemic? It depends on who you ask, I suppose.
Mark Powers, president of the NW Horticultural Council, believes they’ve done alright…
POWERS … “Yeah, we did. I mean it’s never perfect, right, and you don’t want to over-promise. You want to over-deliver and under-promise.”
That’s not to say there haven’t been challenges …
POWERS … “You know, one of the challenges, I think Bob, for folks that do what we do, is recognizing that we have to work through other people, whether it’s Congress or administrations or in foreign trade or any of that, we rely on the U.S. government to do certain things. And sometimes they’re able to do what we need to have done and sometimes they aren’t. And 2021 was no different.”
But overall, Powers says …
POWERS … “On the positive side, industry has weathered COVID and it did so, I think, fairly well overall.”
Thanks in part, Powers says to government …
POWERS … “There was some assistance from the government over the past couple of years to that end, which was helpful. There were any number of challenges, from marketing to labor to international trade. I mean, you just go down the list. Everything was affected, but we weathered it well.”
Tune in tomorrow for more on getting through these challenging times … which may continue for some time.
