Ann Donahue
Western Growers, Director, Marketing and Communications
Ann Donahue serves as Director, Marketing and Communications for Western Growers, where she is responsible for external communication efforts and publicizing the Association’s executives, initiatives, and members across all media platforms. Ann spent more than 20 years as an editor and reporter covering entertainment journalism, with bylines at publications including Variety, the L.A. Times, Billboard, […]
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AgMonitor: Data is Great, but Answers Are What Really Matter
By Ann Donahue Numbers on a spreadsheet are just that—numbers. Devoid of its bigger context, collecting data can seem like a mind-numbing process without end, aggregating points of information that never develop into a plan of action. This is where artificial intelligence can help integrate domain expertise to mine the data for you—and get you ...
Focus on Philanthropy: Building Marian Regional Medical Center’s Crisis Stabilization Unit
By Ann Donahue Right now, a person having a mental health crisis in California’s Santa Maria Valley will have a difficult journey. In the midst of personal upheaval—be it suicidal ideation, post-partum depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or extreme anxiety—the first stop will be a trip to the emergency room. If the individual requires additional care ...
Focus on Philanthropy: The California Farmworker Foundation’s Pillars of Support Serve to Build a Community
By Ann Donahue For Hernan Hernandez, everything begins and ends with family. As the Executive Director of the California Farmworker Foundation, he understands that family comes in two forms: the one you’re born into, and the one you choose. “I grew up in a town called Richgrove, California, population 3,000,” he said. “I grew up ...
WG Member News
By Ann Donahue John D’Arrigo Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of Arizona CEO and Chairman of the Board for D’Arrigo California John D’Arrigo recently received the prestigious Eugene G. Sander Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of Arizona for his leadership and service to the agricultural community and U of A’s Yuma Center ...
2022 WG Chairman Albert Keck on the Urgent Need to Tell Ag’s Story “We Matter”
By Ann Donahue There is—perpetually, it seems—an extensive menu of issues that face the agriculture industry. There are problems that can be ordered up at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and even for a midnight snack when sleep doesn’t come easy: water, labor, regulations, immigration, pesticides, shipping, transportation, COVID. And then maybe you can have something like ...
Mental Health Awareness: A Community Approach is Vital to Saving Lives
By Ann Donahue, WG Media Relations Manager A recent study revealed that an encompassing perspective that includes individual, familial and societal factors is needed to address the increasing number of deaths by suicide in farmers. The numbers are heartbreaking. In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report revealing that farmers and ...
WG Women Ambassador: Heather Mulholland, Chief Operating Officer, Mulholland Citrus
Heather Mulholland is a fourth-generation citrus grower in Orange Cove, Calif., where she works alongside her family as COO at Mulholland Citrus. Farming is something she has been drawn to since she was a child—her sixth grade science project was on beneficial insects—and after attaining a bachelor’s degree at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and ...
A Homeland Under Siege
For Wish Farms, a donation to World Central Kitchen for the non-profit’s work in Ukraine was about more than wanting to help a country in turmoil. It was personal. Media coverage of war zones has always been a harrowing affair—for centuries, journalists put their lives on the line alongside soldiers in order to give readers, ...
WG Women Reaches Membership Milestone
At the midway point of 2022, WG Women reached a significant milestone: There are now more than 100 women participating in the leadership development program. The mission statement of WG Women is to identify and prepare women in production agriculture for positions of leadership with Western Growers and the fresh produce industry. Through virtual and ...
What’s Trending: Why Ag Stories Can Still Make an Impact During a Contentious News Cycle
We’ve all been guilty of it, especially during the last six months: Doomscrolling. With a near-constant grind of weighty, difficult news stories available 24-7 on your nearest screen, it’s easy to zone out as the grim parade of current events passes in front of us: politics, economic upheaval, pandemics, natural disasters and war. With all ...
Annual Meeting Preview: S2G Ventures Teams with WG for Fifth AgSharks® Competition
There is competition, and then there is competition with a quarter of a million dollars on the line in front of a live audience filled with people hanging on your every word. We’re referring, of course, to the AgSharks® Competition, which will return to the 2022 Western Growers Annual Meeting. This year’s Annual Meeting will ...
The 96th Western Growers Annual Meeting in Las Vegas Will Hit the Jackpot with Networking, Education and Entertainment
We can’t hold our cards too close to our vest anymore: You are invited to join the full house for the Western Growers Annual Meeting, which will be held at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas from Nov. 2-5, 2022. (Fine, fine. We’ll stop with Vegas puns now.) This will be the 96th WG Annual Meeting, ...
Western Growers’ 2022 Award of Honor Recipient Exemplifies the Best of California Agribusiness: Celebrating John Harris’ Golden State
In “East of Eden,” Nobel Prize-winning writer John Steinbeck wrote the following: “And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must ...
Supreme Court Rejects Bayer’s Appeal to Stop Roundup Lawsuits
The United States Supreme Court on June 21 declined to review Bayer’s appeal that could have ended thousands of pending lawsuits that claim its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer. The court left in place a $25 million judgment in favor of Edwin Hardeman, a California man who says he developed cancer from using Roundup. His case ...
New VofV Episode: The Yield Lab and the Exponential Growth Potential of Latin America
This week’s episode of Voices of the Valley explores the opportunities for agtech innovation and investment in Latin America. Accelerator The Yield Lab is dedicated to funding companies across the globe and then assisting with their growth and development for the long haul. “We’re not in a rush,” says Tomás Peña, Managing Director, The Yield ...
ChysaLabs: Eliminating the Guesswork When it Comes to Soil Health
Real-time diagnostic soil sampling can result in higher yield and optimized fertilizer costs. By Ann Donahue There is the classic business school lesson about the legs of a stool, where each leg represents one element of getting a product out the door: speed, precision and cost. An organization needs to balance all three, or else ...
CDFA Offers New Online Tool to Make Application Process for Climate Smart Ag Programs More Efficient
The California Department of Food and Agriculture, the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research and the Conservation Biology Institute have released a new web-based tool to provide farmers and ranchers with essential information about applications for climate smart agriculture programs. The tool is named RePlan: Regional Conservation and Development Planning Tool, and it combines site…
New VofV Episode: Agtech’s Role in Combating Climate Change
Sarah Nolet, Co-Founder and General Partner at Sydney, Australia-based VC firm Tenacious Ventures, focuses on investing in early-stage agtech startups with an eye towards how they will help provide innovations to assist with the ramifications of climate change. “Ag can actually be a solution for a lot of the challenges we’re facing,” Nolet says in ...
WG Seeks Participants for New Climate Change and Sustainability Working Group
The push for climate-minded policies at the state and federal level is getting stronger than ever. Countless proposals are being floated – from carbon emission reduction and renewable energy technologies to farm conservation programs and water quality. However, all these efforts currently overlook or miss a key point: their impact on – or usefulness to ...
USDA Visits WGCIT to Learn About Agtech Innovation
On April 26, 14 representatives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture visited the Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology in Salinas, Calif. Among those who toured the facility to meet with the startups was Bill Richmond, Chief of the U.S. Domestic Hemp Production Program for the USDA and Robin Chilton, Director, Standards Division of ...