Vegetable Growers News

Editor has Energetic Resolution for the Coming Year

It’s a great year to make New Year’s resolutions. Elections are coming this fall, and from the amount and earliness of the political activity, everybody seems to be getting primed to cast a few important votes come November. It’s like having almost a whole year to decide what your resolutions are going to be. I take resolutions seriously. I believe individual decisions, carefully thought out and implemented, can have larger effects because they become models for the actions of others. While I intend to cast my votes carefully this fall, I’m not waiting to get started. My resolution for this year is to seriously begin to face up to $100-a-barrel oil and find ways to reduce its effects on my pocketbook and my environment. I’ve always thought the environment is more important than my pocketbook, and I am concerned about the role I’ve played over the years in…  » Read more

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Farm Markets Riding High on Agritainment

Farm markets are doing quite well, thank you, and while they’re not driving Wal-Mart out of business, Wal-Mart’s not driving them out, either. In fact, the level of enthusiasm for direct farm marketing is increasing across the United States, compelled by different forces in different regions. In the East, the driving force is “buy local,” said Ben Vitale, who is involved in farmers’ markets as a career and in a market on his own farm. Whether the food is from California, China or Chile, people are showing their distrust of foods of distant or foreign or unknown origin. “Food safety is a growing issue. During the spinach recall last year, our farmers sold out of spinach,” Vitale said. “It wasn’t spinach they were afraid of, it was spinach from far away.” Vitale is executive director of the Central New York Regional Market Authority, a combination terminal market and farmers’…  » Read more

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Food Safety, Labor and Fuel Costs Dominate Shipping

The Vegetable Growers News interviewed a handful of experts to get their perspectives on recent trends in vegetable shipping. Labor Everyone agreed the industry needs an adequate legal labor force. The availability and cost of labor is felt throughout the entire produce industry, from growing and packing to the shipping end. When growers aren’t certain how many workers will show up – or how much they will cost – they’re not certain how much to plant. “They’re putting something in the ground without any real knowledge if anybody will be there to harvest it,” said Pat McDonald, president of Yakima, Wash.-based Pacific Marketing International, which represents vegetable shippers from Washington and Oregon. Food safety Nobody’s quite sure what to do about food safety either, McDonald said. The problem is, there’s no single food safety standard. Major retailers have different requirements and often use different auditors. Mountains of paperwork add…  » Read more

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