Tom Van Well checks the rooting of CG.202 rootstocks at Waimea Nursery in Nelson

Tom Van Well checks the rooting of CG.202 rootstocks at Waimea Nursery in Nelson

Good Fruit Grower is a nonprofit, grower-owned magazine with a small staff and conservative budget, so, when we decide to send our writers and salespeople across the country or around the globe, it’s not done lightly. Yet travel has become an important, even essential, part of our business in recent years.
Our advertising sales team travels to a number of horticultural shows each year to keep in contact with the people who make the magazine financially possible, but it’s the increased number of editorial trips that, I think, has made the most significant difference to the quality and breadth of what we can offer to our readers. In the last couple of years, we have covered growing and marketing practices in New York, Mexico, and China.

Then last fall, Melissa Hansen, our associate editor, toured the Patterson and Reedley areas in California, where she met and interviewed a number of progressive growers and shippers. Her reports appeared in our February 1, 2007, issue and detailed the horticultural practices these California growers are using to reduce expenses while maintaining quality. She also spent time with a University of California Cooperative Extension specialist who had some good ideas of how to keep growers’ expenses down. By reaching out to growers and educators in different regions who have developed practices to meet their needs, growers in the rest of the world may learn how to grow better fruit, and to do it efficiently. We believe that it’s in everyone’s best interest that the fruit consumers buy is delicious, no matter where it’s grown or eaten.

Down Under

In February of this year, Good Fruit Grower Editor Geraldine Warner traveled to New Zealand and Tasmania with the International Fruit Tree Association, an organization that’s proven to organize exceptionally educational field trips.

Her exhaustive coverage is always rich with detail, giving even growers who attended the same tour an expanded insight into what they experienced firsthand.

Our writers will also continue to cover horticultural meetings in selected states and provinces to report on exciting new research and horticultural practices in North America.

Even though Good Fruit Grower has subscribers in over 40 countries and all U.S. states, in the big picture of publishing, we are a minor player—but we don’t think that way. We invest in national and international coverage because you expect it of us. And we make sure that what we publish is the best and most accurate we can produce. We owe that to you.