Just shifting the crop towards larger sizes can have a major impact on returns. Target fruit is a moving target. It changes from grower to grower, block to block, and year to year as the markets evolve. “You need to be agile; you need to be making changes. You can’t sit still managing orchards, especially in this competitive arena we’re in now,” Dain Craver, an organic grower at Royal City, Washington, said during a recent Fruit School on Competitive Orchard ­Systems. Economists define target fruit as fruit that returns a profit to the grower after all growing, harvesting, and packing […]