2022 WG CHAIRMAN ALBERT KECK ON THE URGENT NEED TO TELL AG’S STORY “We Matter”
By Ann Donahue T here 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 climate change for dessert?
For Albert Keck, the newly-appointed 2022 Western Growers Chairman of the Board of Directors, a major concern of ag can’t be chewed over, and can be summed up in two words. White noise. Keck, the President of Hadley Date Gardens, Inc. in Thermal, Calif., and a third-generation farmer, is concerned that the laundry list of issues that have faced ag for decades is receding into the background,
becoming an ominous perpetual hum that accompanies every business decision but never actually gets silenced. It’s time, Keck said, for that to change. “It’s like, what’s new in the last 20 years?” Keck asked. “Labor and water are never-ending. They’ve always been there. It’s bad because it seems like they are becoming white noise. But coming out of this COVID time in our country, we're starting to realize how vulnerable we all
6
JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2022
Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker