COLUMBUS, Ohio – Fresh produce makes up a small but valuable segment of Ohio’s agricultural production. From May through November, Ohio-grown fruits and vegetables are found at farm markets and groceries throughout the state and in many metropolitan areas east of the Mississippi River.

Over 200 fruits, vegetables, nuts, and berries make up the hundreds of fresh produce offerings grown on slightly fewer than 5,000 Ohio farms. The USDA’s last Census of Agriculture estimated that fresh produce accounted for slightly under $20 million of Ohio’s agriculture sales.

Columbus hosted the annual Ohio Produce Network meeting in mid-January. The event is an annual gathering of the Ohio Produce Growers and Marketers Association (OPGMA), whose membership includes approximately 115 producers from all over the state.

OPGMA membership ranges from specialty growers who focus on a few products to vertically aligned operations spanning thousands of acres that sow, cultivate, harvest, package, and transport products hundreds of miles away.

The two-day event featured educational programming, a trade show, and networking opportunities. Julie Witten, from Witten Farms and Smith’s Bakery, has attended the Ohio Produce Network meeting since she was a child coming with her father. “We would miss school to attend,” she said.

Witten emphasized the relational and educational aspects of attending the conference. “I enjoy catching up with people at the meetings and learning about new things and it’s just about seeing old friends that you see once a year,” she said.

Valerie Graham, executive director for OPGMA, explained that the board works together to develop educational offerings based on member’s needs and requests. Educational sessions fall into three tiers. “Ideas are brought forward and we work with different groups,” she said. “You’ve got the marketing track, the vegetable track, and you have the fruit track or the apples.”

Alex Buck, outgoing president of the board of directors for OPGMA, pointed out that specialty crop fruits and vegetables are a smaller portion of the commodities produced in Ohio. “However, there is a large group of growers that depend on moving their fruit and vegetables,” he said.

Buck, president of Fresh Forward – the largest apple marketing company in Ohio – represents a collective group of apple growers and a diverse menu of commodities like peaches, cherries, corn and tomatoes. “I represent a large group of growers in the state selling their product to grocery stores, large retail chains, farm markets, schools, hospitals, prisons, just all distributors that can get our fruit to end users.”

Ohio’s geographic location – over 50 percent of the U.S. and Canadian population is within 600 miles of the state – provides vast marketing opportunities for Ohio-grown produce. Membership in OPGMA helps to expand the marketplace through education, cooperation and informed practices. “Our relationships with retail chains and other, other distributors, provide us information before we have meetings with growers to discuss what the consumer trends are,” Buck said.

Demand is what drives the fresh produce market and what’s grown by Ohio producers. “We have to quickly recalibrate what we’re planting each year to match what the customer needs and what we think the customer is gonna need five years from now,” Buck said. “We’re trying to always forecast what they want five years from now because if we’re trying to grow what they need now, we’re too late.”

Sustainable packaging and labor costs are two challenges Ohio producers are looking to mitigate. “We’re trying to find partners and vendors that have more sustainable packing that doesn’t have that large of a carbon footprint,” Buck said. “And we’re trying to find it affordably because a lot of that costs extra that the grower is going to absorb that cost.”

To get a handle on variable labor costs, Ohio growers have turned to the H-2A program, which allows U.S. employers who meet specific regulatory requirements to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary agricultural jobs.

“We only bring them in for the time frame that we need them and as soon as the contract is over, they then go to another region,” Buck said. “However, H-2A dictates the pricing, so we have to pay a set amount. We’re hoping that we can keep that under control too.”

Although OPGMA is not a lobby organization, it does have the capacity to impact legislation that benefits its members at the grassroots level. “There’s a lot of stuff gets passed down to our organization at a state level that we can endorse,” Buck said. “Whether it’s the apple growers, pumpkin growers, or whatever, we can say we’re in favor of it so when our lobbyists go to Capitol Hill they can take letters of support from us – there is some firepower in that.”