Opportunities for Optimism: Marketing U.S. Horticultural Crops Globally

Abstract

Horticulture has entered the decade of the 1990s with a different set of priorities and opportunities for its crops and knowledge. The crops grown by horticulturists, other than perhaps potatoes (Irish and sweet), are seldom the primary contributors to our protein and energy requirements. Our crops are purchased for taste, vitamins, minerals, color, fiber, form, aroma, low calorie/low fat, and tactile sensations, as well as for environmental influences of absorbing carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen, detoxifying pollutants, recycling water, insulating spaces, stabilizing terrain, shading residences, enjoyment, relaxation, aesthetics, and real-estate value enhancement. Horticultural crops can be grown by every inhabitant of our globe. However, they are produced most favorably in only a few sites of temperature, light, elevation, soils, and water. The United States, with the great diversity of climates, can efficiently produce somewhere in our 50 states any horticultural (as well as agronomic) crop. The United States has the traditions and technical expertise of publicly funded research, teaching, and extension programs in both state and federal institutions to support expanding production and export of crops. Opportunities for optimism extend beyond our excellence in the traditional horticultural crop production. U.S. horticulturists also have the privilege of having the largest, most-diverse, bestfunded, wide-ranging research and extension program for agriculture in the world. It is publicly funded, and is free on request, to all our citizens. Never in all of recorded time has such an apparatus existed to deliver the discoveries and technologies of horticultural excellence to any nation. Tough times began to appear in this apparatus in the mid-1980s, when our views of agricultural science, our responsibilities to the environment, and our planning for future generations changed drastically. The costs of science for science’s sake, without an immediate objective and payoff, could no longer be funded in a nation with declining revenues in relation to the escalatMarketing Horticultural Crops Globally: Introduction and Perspective