Four Goals as ‘Marching Order’ for the future

Four Goals as ‘Marching Order’ for the future

By mid 2018 the Almond Board of California (ABC) endorsed four goals which should be reached by 2025: Further reducing the water used for almond growing, increasing adoption of environmentally friendly pest management tools, achieving zero waste in the orchards and fourth goal: improving local air quality during almond harvest.

In a press conference Holly A. King, newly elected to chair of the Board of Directors, Mel Machado, Director of Member Relations at Blue Diamond Growers, Mike Mason, former chairman, Daren Williams, Senior Director of Global Communications of the ABC, and Richard Waycott, President and CEO of the Almond Board, explained the four goals and offered some backgrounds on it.

Holly King emphasized the importance of these goals as the desire of the organization for continuous improvement. “We are working on the metrics it is very important to measure against

these goals. We will be open and transparent regarding the progress for ourselves and the community around us as well. This process will allow us to collect data about how we are doing and how we manage to make optimum use of the resources.”

It’s a bit of a lofty goal, but let’s do it!

Mel Machado: Farmers have always been an innovative group, but they are also a private group. In the last twenty years we increased the water efficiency by 33% by the same amount in pounds of almonds. We knew that but we did not communicate it until we were in the throws of the drought. To take it to the next step we want to reduce the water use by another 20%. Through the whole process of establishing goals it was clear that it was not an easy task to achieve them. And may be will not reach all these levels, but we are open to re-adjust and reset as we need to do.

These goals do not come out of the media. There are four points which I am discussing with grower committees for many years : about pesticides, dust, water, about the biomass products as well. What we have to do is to reach targets, each one after another. If I Iooked to the water goal first I said: How do we get there? Success is normal for us doing things, so that growers forgot: Wow, to a certain degree I did this already. It’s a bit of a lofty goal, but let’s do it.

Richard Waycott: For an industry it is very helpful to have set these goals. There is a time line, and it allows the industry to commit and unify. We believe that these goals are attainable and economically viable and we will finally see whether things we did not expect come up.

It was a part of the discussions around these four goals that these are for the ‘farmer of the future’. How does he or she look like?

Mike Mason: What we will see is that the ‘farmer of the future’ is more

consumer-oriented, in general, he is interested in the economic results, he or she is more business-like in general. The farmer of the future must adapt to the labor force drying out more and more.

Would that boil down to the employment of cognitive robotics?

Richard Waycott: In some areas like spraying we do see some robotic equipment and there are trails underway to explore how harvesting is the next sector of mechanization.

Mel Machado: In the near future I do not see the “human being”farmer being replaced by robotic systems. Tree crops in general are not first choice for mechanization.