Our discussion on Holistic Core Values has veered into a good area: How might we undertake specific research as a network to zero in on this concept of stewarding orchard health in order to grow healthy fruit AND make a decent living at the same time? Our Berkshire Roundtable meeting next week would seem one place this would happen. We’ve now met for almost 20 years, great ideas are proposed, individual growers do their own thing with this, but rarely have we achieved any sense of coordinated insight. It’s the ol’ time and money issue, I know. Each orchardist gets busy with all the demands of the growing season; good intentions laid out in spring stop being tracked effectively; the need for respected interpretation of incredibly varied experience isn’t funded. Too many people today “expect” government and foundation grants should cover any such grower needs. Only the big grower associations in the IPM world have been able to facilitate certain cutting edge research, but even then, only in limited fashion. Still, I have hopes that someday enough of us will be motivated to move beyond the “why not to dos” and see a way. The research pages at Grow Organic Apples have not yet had the input I’d like to see happen on a regular basis. I keep my hand out waiting for some inspired Golden Apples donor to see why funding this particular effort has value beyond current research trends. I am filled with so many bloody ideas of what we need to look at and even unorthodox ideas how we might do that. Some of you face similar fates. Todd has thrown down the gauntlet. I wonder if we are now ready to pick it up.