IRVINE, CALIF. (December 8, 2021) – In the most recent episode of Voices of the Valley, the podcast hosted by Dennis Donohue, the Director of Western Growers Center for Innovation & Technology, and Candace Wilson, CEO of GreenVenus, Netafim USA Team Leader Agronomy West Domonic Rossini spoke about the state of water in California and fighting misconceptions about agricultural water usage.

“Unfortunately, in the state of California and a lot of places, we like to do things drastically,” Rossini said. “For a long time we ignored the environment – it’s fine, we can cut down all the trees, we can kill all the buffalo and we can use as much water as we want. And now there’s been a big shift where we went from that to – now we can’t do anything for any people, we have to do everything for wildlife. We’re going to have to do somewhere in the middle. We’re going to have to have a balance.”

Finding that balance will come from a combination of three things, Rossini said. Companies like Netafim can provide the data and science around precision water usage to growers, who can then tell their honest, fact-based stories to educate the public.

“It doesn’t make news if you’re doing something good,” he said. “The news loves to promote challenges…farmers as a whole are out working. They’re busy. They can’t sit in the political realm and say ‘Please listen to us, we’re out here trying to do this.’ [But] we need to have better stories out there of what we can do.”

Voices of the Valley is produced by Western Growers and its Center for Innovation & Technology.

The embed code for the episode is below:

About Western Growers:

Founded in 1926, Western Growers represents local and regional family farmers growing fresh produce in California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. Western Growers’ members and their workers provide over half the nation’s fresh fruits, vegetables and tree nuts, including half of America’s fresh organic produce. Connect and learn more about Western Growers on Twitter and Facebook.

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