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Albert Keck, President of Hadley Date Gardens and current Western Growers Chair of the Board of Directors, joins the podcast to talk about his family's history in farming and how his decades of experience in the industry leads him to believe that the future could be bright for specialty crops. 

\u201cYou want to talk about pessimism? When I was a kid all I could hear from the industry was: \u2018Only old people eat dates\u2019 and \u2018All our customers are dying.\u2019 It was like Eeyore in 'Winnie the Pooh.' Everything was negative,\u201d Albert says. \u201cWhat we've found recently, the Millennials - God bless them, for all the hassles they throw on us \u2013 they\u2019re all healthy eaters. When I was going up we ate Cheetos and Doritos and hot dogs. And now the young adults want to have healthy food and real food. They are very conscious of what they eat and where it is grown.\u201d

It's this change in consumer taste that Albert believes will define the coming years for fruit and vegetable growers - if the political landscape can work to empower domestic farmers. "We're out there banging on the drum to all of our political representatives, saying 'Hey, you keep throwing stuff at us - the ideals are not necessarily bad, we agree with a lot of the ideals - but we're in a global marketplace that doesn't care about those ideals,'" he says. "It seems like more and more a lot of our political system is definitely hamstringing domestic production. And so that's something we have to contend with as a culture. Are we going to want to grow these crops domestically, or do we just not care?"

Albert will rejoin the podcast next week for Part Two of his interview.