The history of how a small commodity board helped save an industry

摘要

At can sometimes take an emergency to get a group of people together and fight back against a common problem. And that's exactly what happened to the California onion and garlic industry back in 2005 when several onion and garlic growers decided to band together and fight white rot, which threatened to destroy their industry. At the time, most onion and garlic growers had abandoned their fields in the Salinas Valley and Santa Clara, due to white rot infestations. Back then, there were no biological or chemical controls for the fungus, which could ruin entire fields and last in the soil for 20 to 30 years. So, the only solution growers could come up with was to simply start switching fields. When they ran out of room in Salinas and Santa Clara, theymoved to the San Joaquin Valley. But when white rot showed up in Kings City, they knew they had a problem that wasn't going away.