USDA Appoints Our Own Dame Beth Knorr!

On July 28, 2014, USDA announced the appointment of 25 members to the Fruit and Vegetable Industry Advisory Committee, including our own Beth Knorr! The Committee will meet up to two times per year to advise the Secretary of Agriculture on issues affecting the Fruit and Vegetable Industry. Here is Beth's account of the first meeting in DC this September.

By Dame Beth Knorr

It was a whirlwind trip to DC for the USDA Fruit and Vegetable Industry Advisory Committee's first meeting on September 28-29. The committee members, announced in July of this year, jumped in with both feet on Monday morning. The committee includes representatives from small scale agriculture as well as representatives of packers, shippers, processors, large-scale cooperatives, farm labor, trade associations and more. Although there was the expected discussion on logistics and ethics for serving on a committee such as this, we also got to hear from a number of the Fruit and Vegetable Program Division managers to give us a sense of the varied work the USDA does in support of the fruit and vegetable world.

On the second day of the meeting we got to the heart of our task, which was to determine a few topic areas on which we could formulate statements or recommendations to Secretary Vilsack on how the USDA can support our work. We narrowed the topics down to five (which was no easy task!) Education; Research; Labor; Food Safety; and Port Inspections. As you can see these are fairly broad topics.  It is up to the sub-committees to carve out a piece of those topics they feel passionately about in order to come up with recommendations. Those will begin to be hammered out via conference calls, calling on experts for information, and (no doubt) intense debate.

While it can be a little intimidating to be in the same room as people representing organizations that are household names across the world, it's also exciting and encouraging. I'm honored to have a seat at the table, to be able to gain an appreciation of the struggles of everyone trying to get healthy food on our nation's plates, regardless of scale. And I'm doing my part to raise awareness of the struggles and issues of import to the farms we serve in our corner of the world.