05/25/06 Technology Roadmap pt 1

Technology Roadmap. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. When covering unknown territory, getting from one place to another is much easier by following a roadmap. The same holds true when you are the tree fruit industry looking to the future of your business. The Technology Roadmap is a joint project according to Jim McFerson, manager of the Washington State Tree Fruit Research Commission. MCFERSON: It started out as an effort by the Washington Apple Industry to discover a way to deal with global competition and plummeting prices received and escalating prices for everything we buy. And this was in 2000, so it came at a crisis time in the apple industry. Subsequently has grown to include the tree fruits that we grow in the Pacific Northwest and it's become a national effort among the producers and processors that all face the same thing, a global marketplace. So what is the Technology Roadmap? MCFERSON: We're talking about technological approaches to improving the quality of the product and improving productivity per unit. So we want to increase efficiency but it's got to be of targeted fruit. It has to be increasingly higher quality fruit. And we believe there are technological ways of dealing with that situation. They range from genetics and genomics to breeding to automation and sensors, integrated pest management in an integrated systems approach. McFerson says the project goes beyond the realm of the northwest. MCFERSON: Surprisingly, we find that the situation that apples growers in New York State or Pennsylvania or Washington; we face very, very similar problems. High labor costs, high land costs, water availability, environmental regulations. It really is quite a similar picture. And we're not suggesting that technology solves our problems or does anymore than allow us to at least compete in a global marketplace but we feel that without taking technological steps and staying current with technology and staying nimble, then ours is a dying industry and in many places it's a dead industry because we haven't been able to keep up and we've been unwilling to adopt technologies that we need to. Tomorrow, where is the Technology Roadmap going? That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.