Yakima, WA-based FirstFruits Marketing of Washington recently added more manpower and expertise to its organic sales team with the hiring of Paul Newman as an organic sales specialist.

Mr. Newman brings more than 20 years of sales and marketing experience to FirstFruits Marketing and will join Matt Miles as the core of the firm's organic apple sales team. The duo will have one of the larger organic apple manifests to market, totaling more than 1.5 million cartons of product this crop year.

Potato growers in Prince Edward Island, Canada, experienced a difficult harvesting season this year. Greg Donald, general manager of the Prince Edward Island Potato Board in Charlottetown, PEI, met with Wesley J. Sheridan, PEI minister of agriculture, in late October to discuss the harvesting problems that growers were facing.

"I followed up on my meeting with the minister during the first week of November and requested disaster funding based on the then estimated 10- 15 percent potential crop loss," Mr. Donald told The Produce News in mid- November.

Sheri Mierau, president of the California Tree Fruit Agreement, resigned from her post Tuesday, Dec. 1, and simultaneously it was announced that she was joining Dinuba, CA-based grower-shipper Fruit Patch Sales LLC as its vice president of sales and marketing.

In a letter to the CTFA committee members, Ms. Mierau announced that she had resigned during the Dec. 1 CTFA Executive Committee meeting and said she would continue in her position until the end of the year. She joined CTFA in 2004 as vice president of marketing and became president in December of 2006.

The Orlando, FL-based National Mango Board held a board meeting Nov. 17- 18 in Orlando, bringing together a diverse group of industry members from Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico and the United States.

PHILADELPHIA -- Many key players in the Chilean fruit business were on hand Nov. 19 to honor Leo Holt, president of Holt Logistics Corp., at the 12th annual Friend of Chile award luncheon. Holt Logistics headquarters are in Gloucester City, NJ.

Bob Norberg, deputy executive director for the Florida Department of Citrus in Lakeland, FL, told The Produce News that the current three-year referendum on citrus, which taxes 1 cent per box to growers for research on citrus diseases, ends with the 2009-10 citrus season.

"We are asking growers if they want to continue to tax themselves to support citrus research and to increase the tax to 3 cents per box," said Mr. Norberg. "Depending on the size of the crop, that would generate between $5 [million] and $5.5 million for continued research."