06/09/06 Trends to improve apple profit

Yesterday we heard from Welcome Sauer from Welcome Consulting and Analysis talking recently at an apple grower's conference about Trends that help move markets. Sauer gave growers a list of areas to be scrutinized by farmers to help control costs and drive up profits. He was adamant that by managing grower induced defects higher margins are possible. SAUER: How can we reduce the sunburn, reduce the insect damage, reduce the limb rubs and reduce the bruising at harvest time? All of these are grower induced defects. Just doing that is worth probably more money than anything else on the list. He also talks about quality. SAUER: The as we go down the list; bins per acre. Just increasing that productivity per acre is a reasonable number in terms of its impact, relative impact but not nearly to the level of packs per bin. In other words, quality makes more money than almost anything else on the list. And we just cannot emphasis how important packs per bin is because of what I said before. We sell more packs, we generate more revenue and we reduce our costs at the same time. We can control the decisions we make about farming. We can control those pack out decisions the size decisions and grade decisions. I would much rather hear us talking about, rather than talking about what should I put in the bag, after that point we've already put a lot of money into that apple. If we ruin it at that point, there's not a whole lot we can do about it. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.