Washington State Tree Fruit Association

Washington State Tree Fruit Association. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report.

It has been a long time coming. Jon DeVaney, the new president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association says it's not really a new organization.

DEVANEY: Really it's a continuation of the four existing organizations merging together. It's maintaining the membership that pervasively existed in those groups and just combining them to get better value for the dues dollar that folks in the industry are paying. We're going to maintain those same services and hopefully improve them but it's not like starting something new that we hadn't been doing before.

He says it's more about finding a more efficient way of doing what they have been doing for over 100 years.

DEVANEY: We had various areas in which the four previous organizations had overlapping responsibility. Yakima Valley Grower-Shipper and Wenatchee Traffic were both collecting data on behalf of packers and marketers and reporting that back to the members and then also doing some government affairs work.

Then there was the Growers Clearing House and the Washington State Hort Association

DEVANEY: So you had similar, overlapping circles of membership among those four groups and a lot of similar missions in the areas of education, government affairs and industry statistics and folks had been seeing for a long time that there's probably a more efficient way to deliver those services.

That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.