1/21/08 Fruit School

Fruit School. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. The fruit industry is growing by leaps and bounds. There are many new technologies that are getting ready to change the industry even farther. Gwen Hoheisel with the Benton County Extension says they are bringing back the Fruit School. HOHEISEL: They used to do fruit schools a long time ago. The WSU and tree fruit extension team has gotten together and said let's revive this. We're going to try to do them annually but this is the first one done again in a while. Hoheisel says there is a lot of good information available at the school. HOHEISEL: They're basically intensive one to two day workshops that really want to delve in depth on an issue within the industry. And this year's issue is competitive orchard systems. That's because we really need to push our industry into this realm of thinking about how are we going to  not just new horticultural practices and new techniques that make us more competitive or more efficient but also looking at it from a marketing and economic standpoint. This first fruit school is going to really be focused more toward the apple growers in the area. HOHEISEL: The primary reason is that we know horticulturally how to develop apples on a high density orchard, get them to a system that can facilitate or be more conducive to mechanization and automation and the horticultural practices are just worked out. For more information on the upcoming Fruit School, call your local county extension office. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.