Keeping Ahead of Consumers on New Varieties

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Growers of many fresh produce products have a choice to make when considering new varieties: will the rewards be worth the risks? ProducePay founder Pablo Borquez says from his experience, the most progressive farmers are those who aren’t afraid to try something new and innovative.

Borquez... "Normally retailers have a specific set of varieties they're willing to buy, or they buy different varieties of a certain crop at different quantities. They say, “These are 10 qualified varieties of which I need a million cases a week. These are smaller niche varieties of which I need 200,000 cases a week.” And then we would go out there and we would do it. Now we've been lucky enough that our farmer partners are the best farmers in the world. They keep themselves informed. So we rarely, if ever, have to educate the farmers as to which varieties are the best. Most of them tend to have enough of an exposure to the market that they will keep themselves going in the new variety."

Borquez admits that sometimes, this is where working with small or medium farmers pays off.

Borquez... "It's not always about size, it's about doing things right. Like, a medium-sized farmer that is willing to invest in the right varieties, even if they're newer and he has to spend more time, like, keeping himself relevant to what those varieties are, we work with them. But, all the big farms today, they have to work, with the new varieties. Otherwise, like, they'll make themselves irrelevant."

Again that’s the founder of ProducePay, Pablo Borquez.